The field at Templeton secondary is one of 28 school fields across the city that closes down each summer. A fence is put up to keep people off the field while workers replenish the grass. At least that’s the intention.
Kat Cortes, who lives across the street with her husband and two dogs, says the field at Templeton was poorly cared for last year with no work being done most days, resulting in unkempt, overgrown grass. In response, she created an online petition to convince the school board to re-open the field during the summer.
“Very few things happened during the whole summer where there was like three to four days they were working on it,”said Cortes of last year’s closure. “The rest of the days, nothing was being done. So that’s why it had overgrown. That’s my fear again this year because the people in the school are not here to see it. The people that they have hired are probably not doing a great job and they don’t know about it.”
The school board’s director of facilities James Meschino says closing the field is necessary in preparation for September.
“If we kept the field open, then we wouldn’t be able to get contractors on site and our own people on site to do the aeration and to do the seeding and the top dressing,”said Meschino, adding that in the past putting up signage did not deter people from staying off the field during maintenance.
Cortes argues the neighbourhood, as a whole, contributes to the field’s upkeep in other ways during the summer.
“If anyone is disrespecting the area, whether they are destroying anything here, we call the police,”said Cortes. “Or we keep it clean when they’re not here, when they don’t have the funds to have someone here in the summer to clean the fields. It’s us doing that.”
As of July 16, Cortes’s petition had 244 signatures.
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