WORCHESTER, MA -- I guess I shouldn’t be so shocked at the venom being spewed at a proposed playground for kids who attend Vernon Hill School and live in that neighborhood.

After all, nobody seems to care anymore about where the children play. Playground equipment such as slides, swings and jungle gyms can only be found at two of the city’s 33 elementary schools.

“We don’t do playgrounds,” Eugene Olearczyk, plant manager for the Worcester public schools, once said.

Fortunately for the kids who attend Vernon Hill Elementary School, a parent found a way to get them a playground. Unfortunately, this parent and the playground are taking a lot grief from certain residents, who frankly need to get a grip.

I took this issue up in my previous column. Briefly, the main points are these:

Now that schools have passed their supplies and extracurricular budgets onto the back of parents, Lin Hultgren and other members of the school’s PTO sought grants and conducted fundraisers to get seed money for a playground adjacent to the school.

The city, which had promised to compensate residents who endured municipal landfill and composting operations in the Quinsigamond Village and Vernon Hill area, chipped in the bulk of the money to build the playground.

But some residents in the Granite Street and Gibbs Street area argue that the former landfill on Ballard Street, now the site of an extensive city composting operation, impacts them the most, and that putting a playground at the Vernon Hill School does nothing for them.

“Oh my God! I never expected all this to happen,” Ms. Hultgren, the parent who got the ball rolling on the playground, wrote to me.

“We only wanted a playground for our children. I expected some valid concerns, which were expressed at the meeting, those of safety, trash, etc., but never in a million years did I ever expect anything like this!”

Read more. It's a really interesting editorial on the importance of play in communities. Then log into the forums and share your thoughts.