PACOIMA : Students Take Part in Graffiti Paint-Out

After strapping a surgical mask over his UCLA baseball cap, 12-year-old Marco Godoy dipped a roller in a bucket of beige paint and faced his target.

“It’s time for some action,” the sixth-grader said moments before using his roller to attack a block wall marred with graffiti near Montague Street School, which he attends.

Within two hours Thursday, Marco and other students from his combined fifth- and sixth-grade class covered the unsightly scrawls in the alley behind their Pacoima school with fresh coats of beige and blue paint, all in the name of community beautification.

“It’s where we live, right? We have to keep it clean,” Marco said.

The class was prodded into tackling the community-involvement project by seniors at Monroe High School in North Hills, who worked alongside the elementary students as they painted between Montague and Branford streets.

The 12th-graders spent 12 weeks teaching lessons on the intricacies of government--from the Bill of Rights to community problem-solving--to students at Montague and three other schools in the northeast San Fernando Valley, teacher Mark Elinson said.

The seniors ended a course called Community Involvement for Today’s Youth with community projects at all four schools to help both themselves and the younger students put what they learned into practice.

“We taught them about their community,” 17-year-old Salisa Mohammed said, “so we wanted them to be a part of painting the graffiti so they can feel they contributed to keeping their community clean.”

The Montague students had another mission in mind when they took part in the paint-out: They want to send a message to taggers that defacing property is not cool.

“We want to emphasize, ‘Don’t tag.’ It’s ugly,” said 11-year-old Wendy Reynolds, a sixth-grader who helped draw posters hung near the newly painted walls pleading with taggers to “just keep it clean.”