It takes a village, the cliche goes, to raise a child. It doesn’t hurt if they have some spare time to raise that child’s new playground, though.

A cadre of community volunteers helped construct a set of playground equipment at Greywolf Elementary School on Saturday, Aug. 13 — capping off a year-long effort to replace what was deemed unsafe equipment at the Carlsborg school.

“This is exactly what we need for the space we have,” Greywolf Parent-Teacher Association board member Rebecca Bratsman said.

The project in the end wound up costing about $33,000, Bratsman said, with volunteers saving about $3,000-$4,000 by lending a hand Saturday.

Last August, Sequim school district officials completed an official assessment of Greywolf’s 25-year-old playground equipment and found was that three of the six pieces of large playground pieces geared for students in grades K-2 were not up to the newest safety codes. The district removed the pieces within the week and was left with an empty spot on the playground and some of its youngest students out of luck.

To solve the playground predicament, the Greywolf Parent-Teacher Association started a fundraising drive. The PTA voted to donate half of the $10,000 it raised from a recent cookie dough fundraiser to the effort, association president Dede Bessey said, and the school district contributed $10,000 to the project. The fundraising got a big boost from the Sequim Valley Lions Club, which donated $7,500. Students at Greywolf, a K-5 school, got involved as well with a “Pennies for the Playground Drive” that saw Greywolf youths bringing in spare change.

As local Rotarians and “others put some of the finishing touches on the playground equipment Saturday, Bratsman noted the favorite part of the big toy will clearly be the slides — “Because they don’t have slides.”

For more information about Greywolf’s PTA, see www.greywolfpta.com.