Fifth-grade children map out future of Logan City
If the future planning of Logan were left to fifth-grade students at Woodruff Elementary School, the city would have an abundance of laser tag, fun parks and stores where everything is free.
Utah State University students and city planners from Logan visited the students of Nancy Stewart’s fifth-grade class this week, conducting workshops that asked the children what would be in their ideal neighborhood.
While the response from the students included many ideas of amusement parks and roller-coasters throughout town, there were some students, like Mackay Keyes, who wanted something a little simpler.
Keyes said he would like curbs and gutters.
“At our house, there’s a big-traffic street,” Keyes said. “The water, when it leaks into the ditch, it could go in the gutter.”
Many students in the area around Woodruff live in new subdivisions where the lack of curbs and gutters causes muddy messes on some streets.
“Kids’ perception of their neighborhood is so great,” said Logan City Planner Michelle Mechem. “Their ideal city is things we need to strive for.”
As Logan is putting together its general plan for the future of the city, Mechem said input from the students will be included to help shape the long-range planning document.
“These are the guys who are going to say, ‘Oh wow, remember when we said we wanted a fun park?'” she said.
Mechem said older generations might not see the results that will come about because of the general plan, but the young students will.
Junior accounting major Doug Mecham said the activity with fifth-graders was organized as a service project for an MHR 3110 class.
“We had asked some people from the city, and this is what we got,” Mecham said. “[Logan] really wanted to start this. They’d done it in other cities but didn’t have the manpower to do it here.”
Mecham said his favorite part of working with the children was their personalities.
“They make really funny comments. They’re really honest about what they say about things,” he said. “I really like Dalton’s free store.”
The free store, thought up by student Dalton Brown, would allow people to go in, get what they need and go home.
“There’d be no burglary or anything,” Brown said.
While everything would be free in the store, Brown said, employees wouldn’t need to worry about their wages, because “they’d share.”
Mechem said the ideas children presented were examples of their upbringing.
“Children are great representatives of their family and their family values,” she said. “One group over here had a gun range.”
The importance of getting young children involved with city activities and participating in these types of planning activities is tremendous, Mechem said.
In the end, the best part of the experience for USU students involved in the activity was seeing the creativity come out of the kids, said Jason McMullin, a senior finance major.
“They really care about what goes into their neighborhood,” he said.
-str@cc.usu.edu