Is Waukesha's Playground Passport Making Parks Fun, Or Just Fun-Adjacent? One Civic Observer Weighs In

WAUKESHA — I have now read the Playground Passport rules three times, and I want to state up front that I understand what a passport is. I held one for 31 years of continuous employment with this city's Department of Public Works and never once needed it to visit a park. That's the whole comment. I could stop there. I am not going to stop there.

For anyone who hasn't had a booklet pressed into their hand by an enthusiastic nine-year-old, the program works like this: kids visit any of nine designated parks and trails, including Frame Park, Minooka Park, and the Fox River Sanctuary Trail, get a page stamped or initialed at a marked checkpoint, and collect enough stamps by Oct. 11 to earn a badge and, for the truly dedicated, a certificate suitable for framing. The city's Parks and Recreation Department is calling it the Trail Challenge. I am calling it a punch card for a sandbox.

The Numbers, Which I Requested

Parks Director Michael Torres tells me attendance among the 8-to-14 age group is up 34 percent at participating sites since the program launched in mid-July, and I don't dispute the figure, because I called the department and they read it to me twice. What I dispute is what the figure is measuring. A kid who shows up to a playground to get a piece of paper initialed is not, in my professional and now retired opinion, doing recreation. He is doing an errand that happens to have monkey bars nearby.

"We used to visit parks because we liked being outdoors. Now you apparently need a passport."

— Bob Krueger, retired Waukesha DPW supervisor

I raised this directly with Torres, who has been in the job two years and has, to his credit, taken my calls every time, which is more than I can say for some of his predecessors. "The passport gets kids to parks they wouldn't otherwise visit," Torres said. "Once they're there, the passport's not doing anything. The park's doing everything." I told him that's a nice way of saying the paperwork is a delivery mechanism, and he agreed that yes, in a sense, it is, and I said thank you, that's the whole column.

Documentation Is Not The Same As Recreation

I spent three decades maintaining the equipment these children are now required to have their visits notarized in front of. I resurfaced the basketball court at Frame Park myself in 1998, on a Saturday, unpaid, because the contractor no-showed and the tournament was Monday. Nobody stamped anything. Nobody needed proof I'd been there. The court existed, and I used it, and that was the entire transaction between me and the City of Waukesha's parks system for a period of roughly four hours.

My granddaughter, who is 11 and lives on the south side, has three stamps toward her badge and has informed me the checkpoint at Cutler Park has a longer line than the swings. I asked her if she likes the parks better now that there's a passport. She said she likes the badge. I asked if she'd go to the parks without the badge. She thought about it for a while, which I found more troubling than any answer she could have given.

What I'll Concede

I am aware that a 34 percent jump in attendance is not nothing, and I am aware that a kid who goes to nine parks he otherwise wouldn't have visited is, technically, a kid who has been outside more than he would have been otherwise, badge or no badge. Torres made this point to me plainly and I don't have a clean rebuttal to it. If the passport is the thing that gets a kid off a screen and onto a trail, I'd rather have the passport than not, even if I think it's a slightly ridiculous way to accomplish something a swing set used to accomplish on its own.

What I won't concede is that this represents progress. It represents a workaround. We built parks so children would want to be in them, and 40 years later we're stamping booklets to get them there anyway, which tells you less about the children than it does about everything else competing for their attention. The parks didn't get worse. The competition got better. That's not a park problem. But it's the parks department that's stuck fixing it with a certificate.

The Trail Challenge runs through Oct. 11 at all nine sites. Completed passports can be turned in at the Parks and Recreation office inside City Hall for badges and certificates. I'd encourage every participating family to also, separately and without documentation, just go outside.