We are the Crazy CJ’s – our team consists of Cassie Wardill, Jasmin Shepherd and Chloe Emanuel.
We are year 7 pupils from Beverley High School.
We think the Humberside Police Lifestyle project is an excellent opportunity for local children to do something good for their community.
The Crazy CJ’s decided that we wanted to make our local park at Normandy Avenue in Beverley a better place to play.
A lot of money has recently been spent updating the park by Woodmansey Parish Council but sadly the bins have been vandalised. This has meant the park is full of litter and we took it upon ourselves to clean up the park.
We contacted our Parish council to let them know our ideas and get permission to start the work and we worked 8 hours each picking up litter.
The amount of glass and metal cans we found was alarmingly high and we also found a knife right next to the play area which could have potentially been very dangerous indeed. We did not realise until we started our work what a dangerous place the park had become because of the litter both to the children who play in the park and also to the dogs that are regularly walked in the park.
There is also a wooden wall which children use for playing football against and other ball games. The area in front of the wall is concrete with gravel on it. Sadly over the years the gravel has been contaminated with a vast number of broken pieces of bottles making it not only dangerous if anyone falls on it but also stopped a lot of children playing on it as their football would be popped.
The Crazy CJ’s have swept all of this area removing most of the gravel and glass to leave just the concrete allowing the children to once more play on this area with less chance of injury.
At the end of the day the girls had collected 17 bags of rubbish which the East Riding of Yorkshire Council kindly picked up for us with a special collection.
Their work is not completed there as the girls would like local retailers to help.
The wooden wall in the park is in good condition but in need of tidying up as it has peeling old paint and graffiti on it.
The girls have permission to paint this wall from the Parish Council and would like to request if anyone could offer them paint suitable for the wood to complete this project they would be extremely grateful.
If they could contact the organiser Sue Wardill on 07853181362 with any offers then the Crazy CJ’s would be very grateful and they would be able to make Normandy Avenue park not only a safer place to play but also add appeal to this already unique picturesque park.