Members of the team helping to make the Caryville Cares Playground, the first all-inclusive playground in Campbell County, a reality, spent part of their day on Tuesday handing out inclusive coloring books to second-graders at Caryville Elementary School and Jacksboro Elementary School.
And that was just the beginning. Playground chairman Brandon Johnson said that this week, every second-grader in Campbell County would receive an inclusive coloring book.
While the coloring book project did raise about $1,000 to go toward the playground, the Caryville Cares Playground project looks to cost around half a million dollars.
“The coloring book project is more of an act of love,” Johnson said.
It was borne out of the idea that the playground team didn’t want its contribution to the county to begin and end with the playground project itself.
“We did make a little money out of it from some of our sponsors, but our playground group felt a really strong need, not just to bring a playground here but continue helping and continue investing in Campbell County,” Johnson said. “One of the ways that we wanted to do that is we have produced a coloring book that every single image features a child that may have a disability. Maybe they’re blind or visually impaired. Maybe they are on the autistic spectrum, and that’s visualized in the coloring book. Maybe they have a physical disability that makes them use a wheelchair or a cane or something like that. This coloring book represents kids with those disabilities and is going to teach second-graders a little bit about kindness, a little bit about accepting people that are different, a little bit about loving your neighbor regardless of what they may look like or anything that holds them back. And we want to start spreading that message at an early age. It’s also paired with a lesson for teachers where they have five or six different lessons to teach about the inclusivity, about kindness, and teachers get to self-report. They get to show off the coloring pages. They get to tell us about the outcomes and the results of these lessons that we’ve formulated, and the teacher who has the most participation is actually going to win a $500 grant from our playground team. So we want to give back to those teachers who really show that they care.”
