From the San Antonio Express-News in Texas. Thanks to Barbara for the tip.One doesn't have to spend much time with 12-year-old Matthew Ramon to see a sensitive boy with a sense of humor.
But when he's ensconced at the top of a playground slide, gazing at the sky or maybe screaming, other children tend not to understand.
Matthew and his twin brother, Nicholas, have autism, and years of dealing with their condition gave their mother, Robin Ramon, plenty of ideas for input into a unique park now under construction. The main one: family bathrooms.
“I still have to take them to the restroom, and I have to take them into the ladies' room,” Ramon said.
People rarely go so far as to comment at the sight of adolescent boys in the women's room, she said. “We just get the dirty looks.”
So when local philanthropist Gordon Hartman asked Ramon to help out with what would become Morgan's Wonderland, she was excited. When she saw all the elements planned for the 21-acre park, she was thrilled.
Hartman put together a large team of parents and professionals to design Morgan's Wonderland for children and some adults with disabilities. What is rising from the caliche flats in the old Longhorn Quarry on the Northeast Side appears to be the only one of its kind in the nation, if not the world.
“Wow, that is huge,” said Nancy Starnes, senior vice president of the National Organization on Disability. “This is the perfect example of the kinds of things that are on the scale of inspirational.”
Starnes, whose organization recognizes cities that improve access to existing parks, said she's never heard of anything of this scale. Morgan's Wonderland will have, among other features, a gymnasium, an 8-acre lake, a “train” that chugs slowly around the lake, security and wheelchair-accessible sand pits.
Play is important in the physical sense for children with disabilities, but it's also important for their mental and emotional development, said Carol Gulley, accessibility director at Magik Theatre.
“They're not just out there having fun. It actually changes their thinking patterns, how their synapses fire.”
“Play is child's work, and that's how they learn,” Gulley said. “They learn to look at people in the eye. ... They learn that if a swing goes up, it comes down.”
But if the park is designed for children's fun and learning, it's also designed to give caregivers a break.
That will help Ramon, who enlists her mother, her husband and her 10-year-old daughter to handle the active twins.
And as the boys get bigger and stronger, it's getting harder for the women in the family.
“I have to have a man with me. If not, Nicholas will run into the men's room,” Ramon said. “That's what happened at the pool at Northside (Aquatics Center). ... Nicholas ran into the men's bathroom, and he wouldn't come out. He would not come out. And he was screaming.”
Hartman wanted Ramon's input and that of other parents who had children with disabilities because he only has direct knowledge of his own daughter's challenges.
For 22 years, Hartman ran a successful housing development company. He sold it in 2005 and started the Gordon Hartman Family Foundation to support other charitable groups. Not long afterward, he started thinking about the park.
His daughter Morgan is his inspiration. She is a 15-year-old girl who likes music and videos but struggles with physical and cognitive disabilities.
Many of Morgan's physical problems have been corrected through multiple surgeries, Hartman said, but she is mentally unable to handle “difficult issues in math and reading and that kind of thing.”
Even though she's aware of some of her limitations, and even with 26 screws in her back, he said, Morgan is the most positive person he knows.
“She wakes up every morning with a smile on her face, and goes to bed with a smile on her face,” Hartman said. “Morgan's got it figured out much better than any of us do.”
Hartman has been able to provide Morgan with classes and therapies that help her. But in the process he's met many other families with special-needs children who struggle.
“Families who deal with the issues of medicines and therapy and equipment,” Hartman said, “there's no money left for activities.”
That's why Morgan's Wonderland will be free.
The key to a financially efficient operation will be to have mostly volunteers running the place, Hartman said, although he says he's leaving the details to a park manager he plans to hire by spring. Once the park is running, the next order of business will be compiling the record of how it was done so that others can use it as a resource.
“We're keeping a journal on this,” Hartman said. “If another city wants to do this, we want to help them do this.”
When he decided to build the park, Hartman created a nonprofit organization called Sports Outdoors And Recreation, or SOAR. He said he personally put $1 million into the $22 million project. He then set about lining up some of the area's largest benefactors, including Sirius Computer Solutions founder Harvey Najim, the Kronkosky Foundation and the Valero Foundation.
Like many who signed on to help, Najim went from generally supportive to enthusiastic fan.“When he showed me his vision ... and took me on a visit there, I kind of fell in love with it,” said Najim, who put $1 million into a large butterfly-shaped playscape at the center of the park.
Gulley, of the Magik Theatre, said she came to the table expecting something “nice,” perhaps an accessible playscape that covered an acre or two on the scale of Preston's H.O.P.E., a park in Ohio.
“I was just astonished,” Gulley said. “He said, ‘I know how to build. I'd like your knowledge about theater and about children with a variety of special needs. I need that piece of the puzzle.'”
The group Hartman pulled together began meeting weekly, starting with a core of about a half-dozen people.
“We met many times over a period of six months and dissected every possible aspect of this park,” Gulley said. “I would get giddy with all the creativity in the room.”
The disabilities that fall under the umbrella of special needs are so varied that Hartman and the other planners are feeling their way on what to provide, down to such details as how many swings they should have (35) and how many different kinds (six).
Hartman is mostly undaunted by the hail of particulars.
“For a guy who just used to put bricks and sticks up three years ago, it's a new world,” he said. “This reminds me of when I was 19 years old and built my first house. I didn't know how to build a house then, either.”
Hartman persuaded the city of San Antonio to pitch in $6.2 million in bond money, while Bexar County is contributing $5 million in venue tax money toward the 14 soccer fields he's developing adjacent to the park. The quarry's owners also held some sections back for private development.
On the other side of the quarry, North East Independent School District is building its new stadium, which Hartman said will create useful synergies for both organizations.
“When I have large tournaments I can use their field,” Hartman said, “and they can use some of our soccer fields for intramural games.”
The environment for charitable giving has soured with the economy, but Hartman said he's confident he'll get the funding he needs to finish the park by fall.
“We are going to build this project,” he said.
He still has millions to go. But he regularly announces hefty new commitments, as he did recently with a $1.2 million challenge grant he received from the J.E. and L.E. Mabee Foundation, based in Tulsa, Okla.
Part of Hartman's success comes from the enthusiasm he communicates with everything he says. Recently he drove the floor of the quarry, painting his vision on the caliche flats.
“Let's say you have a kid that's very sensitive to sound. That's why we built the sanctuary garden.”
He pointed to a wide path that will encircle the lake, to the site where a dock will lead to a fishing pier, and talked about how much brainstorming went into trying to anticipate as many needs as possible.
Even as their bodies mature and age, some children with developmental disabilities never get beyond mental childhood, and they need a place to play.
“This won't be (just) for kids 15 and under. This will be for kids 50 and older,” Hartman said.
Everyone who enters the park will get a wristband that will help parents monitor their children, and the wristbands will trigger an alert if the wearer leaves the park.
With its location just off Interstate 35, Morgan's Wonderland could serve people throughout the region. Hartman expects thousands of visitors annually.
And still some may be left out.
“There are some children who are so fragile, unfortunately, we may not be able to accommodate them,” Hartman said. But he's hoping those will be few in number.
With cerebral palsy, a feeding tube, a wheelchair and being legally blind, 9-year-old Adela Medellin would fall under the definition of fragile, and her mother, Maria Medellin, is eagerly awaiting the park.
In the past, when Adela was smaller, Medellin was able to put her on a kids carnival ride with her sister there to hold her. Adela can't hold on.
But during the last Fiesta carnival at South Park Mall, they were turned away.
“I told the guy at the carnival ‘She can't see,' and I had already bought the tickets,” Medellin said. “He said, ‘No,' and I was left with the tickets and her crying because she couldn't get on.”
There are many places most children can go that are off-limits to Adela, Medellin said.
“I can't take her to Chuck E. Cheese or anything like that,” Medellin said. “She likes to crawl, and I can't let her crawl around Chuck E.
Cheese.”
The parents of children with starkly different disabilities utter a common theme: At this park, we wouldn't be the outsiders.