After many months of watching the progress along Eden Terrace Road, the long-awaited opening of Rock Hill’s Miracle Park is almost here. The inclusive park is set to hold a Grand Opening for the public on Saturday, Sept. 18, from 4-7 p.m.
Executive Director Kylie Carroll does not know exactly how many members of the community will be in attendance, but she and her team are preparing for a large turnout of supporters.
“We know that the community has been waiting and [is] very excited. We could have a couple thousand visitors that evening. Because of this, we do want people to know we are planning a ‘drop-in’ event rather than having people plan to stay the whole time. We hope to encourage a steady flow of moving through the park,” Carroll said.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, the Miracle Park team is limiting the number of visitors on the playground and fields at a time and will also spread out a variety of activities across the park to avoid large clusters of the crowd. Playgrounds will have a trained attendant to demonstrate proper use of each piece of equipment to families before use.
“Several of our sponsors will be set up and providing hot dogs, chips, and drinks. We’ll also have a raffle with lots of great items to win. We will have sponsor booths with many freebies and information on ways they can assist our community,” Carroll said.
Miracle Park experienced delays in construction, as the pandemic interfered with the way the park received funding and materials.
“Many of the grants and funding opportunities we had planned to seek out needed to be converted to COVID-relief funds and support of essential businesses. We definitely understand this, but it did slow things down for a while. We also have run into many construction delays related to the inability to get certain materials and delays in shipping,” Carroll said.
According to the park’s website, over 500 donors have supported the production of Miracle Park, raising an estimated $6.6 million, but the park is still in need of roughly $2 million more.
“We did reach and exceed our fundraising goal for Phase 1 and came in slightly under budget. That means that we now have the ability to begin Phase 2. We don’t yet have a total budget for the next two phases, or a timeline, but both are in progress, and we hope to be able to unveil some of our plans at our grand opening,” Carroll said.
Phase 1 construction involved building a state-of-the-art inclusive playground, a standard field and a miracle field. Phase 2 will include another miracle field and two multipurpose fields for soccer, flag football, kickball, basketball and more.
According to the park’s website, only 34% of people with intellectual disabilities are employed nationally, but only 26% of these employed adults have full-time jobs.
In order to combat the increasingly high unemployment rates of people with intellectual disabilities, Phase 3 of the park will create a retail space at the park to employ people with intellectual disabilities. The exact plans for what type of retail space are not official yet.
“This is still very much in process. We are working with several different organizations to form partnerships, and as we were with Phase 1, we continue to be amazed and blessed by the support of our community and their desire to help us continue to build the most inclusive community space ever — a place for everyone to belong,” Carroll said.
With Rock Hill constantly growing to include new dining, housing and entertainment opportunities, as well as being a very sports-orientated community, it is the perfect place for the world’s first park with Universal Design certification.
“Being known as Football City, USA, as well as an All-American City, we have great parks: the BMX Center, Aquatics Center, [and an] indoor sports complex. Miracle Park was the missing piece that will now afford barrier-free access to all,” Carroll said.
Those interested in contributing to Rock Hill’s Miracle Park can visit https://www.miracleparkrockhill.com/ to make a donation or to find more information.
