Page 87 - San Angelo

children in the community.

The Sherwood Way land turned out to be unusable for the intended purpose, but by then the idea had kindled and taken hold in Dr. Wehner’s imagination. In speaking with city offcials, he was offered the use of three existing city-owned playgrounds for the project, and the location off College Hills Boulevard proved the most appropriate. At that location, the development of a new park would be the most economical, “it offered the most bang for the buck,” Dr. Wehner recalls.

Word started to spread and a committee formed. Katrina Pfuger is the mother of two children, one of whom has special needs. He was preschool-aged at the time the park was being planned. “I went to a meeting to learn about the project and I left with a job,” she remembers with a laugh. “It’s hard to say no to Karl.” As a mother of a child with limited mobility who used a wheelchair, she had long observed how limited some children are in their abilities to play with their siblings and friends. Her eyes had been opened to the isolation that children with special needs can face. She and her son had spent much time at West Texas Rehab and she saw that while her son had good use of his upper body, some children faced different

challenges that would require differing levels of accommodation in equipment. She started to see children in the waiting room and wonder “now, how would that child get up a slide?”

Once the city offered the land and the research for equipment began, the project sprouted wings. The newspaper ran a story about the playground and Ben and Beverly Stribling contacted Dr. Wehner to offer funds. They had an adult daughter, Karen, who had sustained severe injuries in an automobile accident, and they wanted to make a donation in her name. Once the Striblings committed a large gift as seed money for the project, a small coalition formed to research other avenues of funding. “Their donation caused other people to see this as a viable, legitimate plan. Their faith in us gave other people faith in our project,” Mrs. Pfuger recalls. Lions Club International gave another large donation.

San Angelo’s Community Hospital had recently changed ownership and the funds from the sale of the hospital became the San Angelo Health Foundation. After being shown the commitment from the Stribling family, the SAHF offered a matching grant for the park. Surprisingly, an idea as seemingly harmless as building a playground to accommodate children

with special needs became controversial and attracted national attention. As non-proft hospitals were being sold to corporations nation-wide, some organizations believed that all funds should be used to increase children’s access to healthcare and that ventures that supported overall community health were a misuse of the funds. So Dr. Wehner found himself featured in the Wall Street Journal in an article about whether recreational opportunities for children with special needs was as legitimate a cause as poor children’s access to medical treatment.

The matching grant pulled in donations from other local families and agencies. The Wolslager Foundation donated funds for the walking track around the park. Craig Kinney, a local architect, designed the playground. Kevin Barry, a former publisher of the San Angelo Standard Times , donated funds for the rose garden in honor of a niece who had become disabled as a result of a metabolic disorder.

The primary requirement for the playground was that it had to be wheelchair accessible. Many surfaces typically used for playgrounds are shredded materials, which will not accommodate a wheelchair. The surfacing