BRISTOL - The students of Mountain View Elementary School need a new playscape and Principal Mary Hawk wants your help.   Hawk said the school has signed up for an online contest where people can vote daily for their favorite school to win new playground equipment.   Colgate, ShopRite, and TerraCycle, a recycling company that specializes in hard-to-recycle waste, are running the contest, in which one school can win a colorful new playscape made from recycled materials, with a retail value of $55,000.   The prize for the first runner-up school is a village playhouse and slide made from recycled materials, with a retail value of $25,000.   The second runner-up school will get a ShopRite gift card for $1,250. The next six runner-up schools will each receive a ShopRite gift card for $150.   The recycled materials used are oral care waste, according to the contest website. These consist of toothpaste tubes and caps, toothbrushes, toothpaste cartons, toothbrush outer packaging, and floss containers, which are shredded and melted into hard plastic that can be remolded into new products.   The regional contest is running now through June 30, when the winners will be announced. Mountain View is the frontrunner.   There are two ways to help Mountain View.   1. Vote for the school daily at the contest website https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/contests/colgateshopriteplayground2019.   Participants can vote daily using and every separate email address counts as a vote. The first vote will require you to confirm your email to make the vote count. After that, each vote is a click.   2. Send Mountain View your oral care containers to recycle.   Each vote will count as one Playground Credit and each unit of used, post-consumer oral care waste will count as one Playground Credit. A “unit” is defined as 0.02 pounds of used, post-consumer oral care products and packaging.   The kids are all bringing in their used toothpaste tubes now, and they’re getting a good message about recycling as well, Hawk said.   If people want to donate their recyclable dental materials, they can just bring it to the school anytime during the school day, she said. “We would love to have other people in the community contribute, that would be wonderful.”   Hawk said if a dental office, nursing home, hospital, or any organization that uses dental supplies wants to donate, “we will go pick it up from them.”   Mountain View has been looking to replace its rusting, corroded playscape since 2017 when Pete Fusco, director of grounds, did an inspection and declared it unsafe. The pre-kindergarten kids have their own playground, which is usable, but the older students just have hopscotch, basketball courts, and other games painted on the blacktop nearby.   Right now there is just a pile of dirt where the old playscape was behind the school. It was 30 years old and was attacked by vandals at night, leaving sharp jagged holes. Hawk said it would have cost as much as $10,000 to repair.   Tabacco & Sons Builders volunteered to remove the pieces and bring them to Liberty Recycling, but in the end the school didn’t even get money from the scrap metal because there was so much cement attached to it, she said.   Since then, the school has been fundraising for a new playscape, she said. “They’re are just incredibly expensive. They range from $40,000 to $120,000, so it’s a monumental task to try to raise all the money.”   Mountain Drive isn’t the only local elementary school in the contest. Ivy Drive, South Side, and Stafford are too, though they are farther down in the competition: Ivy Drive is currently at seventh place, South Side is 19th, and Stafford is 21st.   “But they already have playscapes,” Hawk said. “We just have a pile of dirt.”   Susan Corica can be reached at 860-973-1802 or scorica@bristolpress.com.