Swing sets on elementary school playgrounds in Cabell County will soon become a thing of the past.
Cabell County Schools officials have decided to remove the traditional playground toys because of increasing safety standards and exposure to insurance claims and lawsuits stemming from swing set injuries.
This is getting more and more pathetic as time goes by. The entire country is now at the mercy of lawyers and the lack or tort reform. Soon walking on a sidewalk will be banned. But next on the list: slides.
Found by JD Adkins.
I wonder how many lives have been saved since they banned tetherball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetherball
Think of the children.
I feel lucky having grown up riding around on freight train car ladders, in the beds of pickup trucks, on fat-tired one-speed bikes, and once standing right behind the pilot in an Eastern Airlines commercial DC-3 flight, climbing trees and cliffs, cutting through yards and crop fields, walking down creek beds, swimming in rivers and lakes, exploring construction sites at daybreak.
It was an adult world. We kids just worked out how to live in it. That’s why we wanted to grow up. Now it’s the opposite.
All tort reform does is prevent the citizen from suing a business.
It does NOT prevent a large business from suing YOU.
I’m sure that far more school kids, in the US, are getting severely injured playing football. Some even suffering brain trauma. And yet, nobody’s saying it’s too dangerous a sport, for anyone younger than college age. If there were a huge money making franchise behind swing set use, this wouldn’t be an issue. But since there isn’t a multi-billion dollar sporting industry to lobby for its play in all high schools and most colleges. Then swing sets have no such powerful packing to keep them around.
Frankly, they are pretty dangerous things. Kids under a certain age ought not to be allowed anywhere near them. But good luck pounding that bit of logic into the average parent. They still look at swing sets thru a nostalgic haze. Just as they once did Lawn Darts, and firecrackers. Yeah, we should never give up passing on any age old activities on our kids, just because we’ve learned how potentially dangerous these things are.
A little girl from my neighborhood was killed by a swing set. It was one of this giant iron playground things and the welds holding the top bar had become increasingly weakened until one broke and the bar came down and caved int the side of her skull, killing her. I think she was about 6.
I don’t have a problem in us constantly assessing things that “we’ve always done” to make sure that they are, in fact, safe. When things like swing sets begin disappearing from playgrounds, it is usually the perfect example of the benefits of our capitalist system. They start to disappear because there is a clear increase in catastrophic accidents leading to a clear increase in insurance premiums which leads to a clear increase in their removal from playgrounds. It’s “the invisible hand” protecting us…
What are you talking about? Elementary schools don’t have swing sets? Not true. Ours does and it always has. With that said, bring on tort reform!