No school, no problem says Park City Recreation

Park City Recreations's mobile activities trailer at City Park. Photo: Michele Roepke

PARK CITY, Utah. — Taking the baton from the Park City School District, Park City Recreation provided free, age-appropriate, supervised activities for students who had two unexpected days tacked on to the end of their summer vacation.

The Parley’s Canyon Fire had the entire community rallying around fire services for days including the Red Cross shelter set up in the Park City High School gymnasium. With thousands of families mandatorily evacuated from their homes and four then three then two days left before the first day of school, difficult decisions were being made by grown-ups regarding postponing that first day. Safety first was on the minds of all stakeholders.

Those decisions trickled down to the students who found themselves with little to do on Thursday and Friday before school’s new start date on Monday. Families that had mere days to plan child care had an organization in whose care they could entrust their students, Park City Recreation. 

Word spread like wildfire among local parents that not only was the M.A.R.C. providing free Open Gym time, bounce houses, and Gaga Pit but that their mobile activities trailer would simply be parked at City Park for whoever wanted to utilize the sports equipment it had.

Spencer Madanay, the social media manager and an employee of PC Rec was manning the Park position on Friday. He said, “Once we learned that schools were pushed back, immediately, collectively as a team we came together and talked about what program we could quickly whip up to allow parents to have kids come and play for free and fill up the two days when their students were supposed to start school. So it was just one more little thing that we could do to give back to the community this summer before our fall programming begins.”

Park City Recreation also gave crucial space to firefighters by setting up the incident command center in the parking lots and on the fields they manage at the Park City Sports Complex at Quinn’s Jct.

Open Gym is still going on until 10 pm tonight, no reservation or fee is required.

Some school-aged children who may have associated a certain level of anxiety with the fires had space to gather with their friends who they thought they’d be within classrooms, hallways, and lunchrooms and process the events of the past week in their small town in a fun way.