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Lynn Woods Pennybrook Road entrance.
Trees are budding and Earth Day is around the corner. It won’t be long before parks and playgrounds in Lynn and surrounding communities get cleaned up.
But before the shovels and rakes come out, it might be worthwhile to step back and ask how green spaces can be best used during the handful of months when people flock to them.
Parks and playgrounds are traditionally places where kids play organized sports or casual pickup games. It’s where parks and recreation departments host summer-oriented activities aimed at sharpening sports skills or exposing kids to a world beyond television and social media.
In Lynn’s Highlands, neighbors working with local organizations reclaimed Henry Avenue and Cook Street playgrounds from people who hung out in the parks, drank and got into fights. Both locations enjoy renewals that have made them a focus of neighborhood activities, as well as more traditional park activities.
These park renewal efforts and other examples of residents taking an interest in public spaces near their homes represent a starting point for getting maximum use out of parks and playgrounds during warm weather months.
Parks offer the potential of becoming common ground. These are places where kids with time on their hands and people willing to teach job skills, can meet in a supervised setting and offer young people a glimpse into a trade or professions.
What barriers exist to offering mini job fairs in parks? Is there any reason why social service agencies can’t provide opportunities to extend their services during an organized event at a local park?
With Breakheart Reservation and Lynn Woods offering acres of woodlands for residents to enjoy, there’s an opportunity to teach young people nature-related skills like erosion prevention, tree clearing and planting.
These tasks sound at first like menial chores of limited interest to a generation of children raised on instant messaging and video games. Then again, hard outdoor work stretching over a summer day can teach a young person the fundamental values of work and the joy of a job well done.
Lynn Woods’ protection as a valuable natural asset will only be assured if another generation of Lynn residents gets the opportunity to appreciate the reservation. Why not instill that appreciation by organizing supervised conservation projects kids can participate in?
Parks and playgrounds are typically places where people play but they are also ready-made classrooms.