The girl who picked yellow and purple, and the ramp that got her to the top

Makenna Hiebert was three when an anoxic brain injury took away her ability to run to the swings. Three years later, at St. Anne Catholic School in north Saskatoon, she cut the ribbon on a $370,000 playground she helped design — the first accessible one anywhere north of 33rd Street.

Brittany Hiebert decided the edge could be moved. Her daughter had spent roughly seven months in hospital rehabilitation after paramedics revived her at the scene in 2023; the injury had taken oxygen from her brain and, with it, some of her speech, her fine motor control, her mobility. She came back to school, to kindergarten, then to Grade 1. What she could not come back to was the playground.

So the family started fundraising in early 2025 — barbecues, raffle tickets, poinsettia orders, bingo nights. Justin Hiebert worked the campaign alongside his wife. They toured the accessible playgrounds that already existed in the city, all of them elsewhere, before choosing a layout. Makenna chose the colours: yellow and purple.

The plan was two phases, built years apart, because that was what the money allowed. By early November 2025 the campaign had not yet reached even the first target. Then, in December, a local business made a donation large enough to close the gap. Both phases went up together over the summer.

The design reads as a series of small refusals to make anyone ask for help. Ramps to the structures, rubber surfacing instead of woodchips. Interactive panels set at deck height and again at ground level. A teeter-totter with specialized seating. Lower parallel bars and monkey bars beside the conventional high ones, so two children of different bodies can play the same game side by side. Even the snack shack has a serving window and a ground-level platform sized for a wheelchair.

It is open outside school hours, to the whole neighbourhood. That was deliberate.

We want to create a city and a culture where play is accessible and we don't have to fight for it.

Brittany Hiebert stood beside her daughter at the ribbon-cutting and described the weeks since the gates opened. "Seeing all the kids run out and even meeting some friends here has been really exciting," she said. The playground opened in the school's fiftieth year — a building that has watched five decades of children cross that yard, and only now watches all of them.