PARIS — Students in Tom Light’s sixth-grade class decided this school year that the school playground needed more excitement and students needed to get more fit.

So they built playground fitness equipment for their yearlong service learning project. The school playground on Hathaway Street formerly had two swing sets and a monkey bar for students in kindergarten through grade six.

“It was kind of boring,” student Madison Bangs said Monday.

Each year sixth-grade classes decide on a service learning project in the fall and worked throughout the year to complete it.  In addition to the fitness course construction, another sixth-grade class organized a paper recycling collection project and a third class paired with second-grade students to provide academic support.

Tracey Hartnett, math interventionist at the Paris Elementary School, said the students were involved in all aspects of the project throughout the school year, including choosing the elements to build and writing letters and making phone calls to solicit donations. They also helped design the elements, get the cost of material, build the elements, and write thank-you letters to all of the people and businesses that supported the project.

“Most of it was planning,” Bangs said. The project was constructed the last two weeks of school this month.

In addition to the planning, the students and those in grades five and four committed to being heart healthy during the year as part of an overall effort to improve student health in Oxford County. School officials promoted the effort  after a nationwide, county by county survey showed that the local area young people ranked at or near the bottom in overweight and out-of-shape students in the state.

“Each day they spend 10 minutes at the start of recess walking and/or running around the field. They thought it would be good to add fitness elements that they could do as they complete the laps,” Hartnett said.

Bangs, who has helped build underwater robots and solar-powered cars in other classes, said building the playground equipment was great.

“It was very fun,” she said.

Hartnett said donors for the project included Petro’s Hardware, Hancock Lumber, West Paris Metals and Matt New. Parent volunteers were Meg New and Jay Lester, who used his building skills to help with construction.

The new snowboard bench, push-up/sit-up bars, floating balance, and parallel bars (which are still being completed) can be seen at the Paris Elementary School playground.

Bangs said they hope to have a commemorative plaque placed on the snowboard bench during the upcoming school year.

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