Parents Team Up to Put Shine on Old School’s Bathrooms : Volunteerism: Families at Camarillo Heights lend a hand as the Pleasant Valley elementary district waits for state funds.

Kathy Bocash and her family made some unusual outings this summer.

On many days, instead of going to the beach, the zoo or on a picnic, Bocash, her husband and their three children drove to their neighborhood school.

After stashing the children in a classroom with a baby-sitter, the Bocashes and about seven other parents went to work--in the school’s bathrooms.

In one of the more extensive parent volunteer projects in Camarillo’s Pleasant Valley Elementary School District, Bocash and the other parents each spent up to 80 hours this summer sanding, scraping and painting seven restrooms at Camarillo Heights School.

Bocash said she organized the project because she realized that remodeling bathrooms would not be a high priority for the cash-strapped district.

“The district can only really afford things that are broken to be replaced,” she said. “They can’t afford to just spiff.”

And these bathrooms needed some spiffing up, parents and teachers said.

Built in 1956, Camarillo Heights School is the second-oldest school in Pleasant Valley after Los Primeros Structured School.

As with some of the district’s other old schools, peeling paint is the least of Camarillo Heights’ problems: The school’s pipes are rotting. Its electrical wiring is inadequate. And its roof leaks.

After the district failed twice in 1991 to pass a bond issue to repair older schools and build new ones, Pleasant Valley now has a tentative promise from the state for $5.2 million to refurbish schools that are more than 30 years old.

But the state funds won’t come for another year or two.

In the meantime, Pleasant Valley officials are doing what they can to keep the older schools from falling apart.

And parents and volunteer groups are chipping in.

This summer, the district spent $37,000 painting the outside of Camarillo Heights, covering the dull, chipped yellow-and-orange paint with a fresh coat of white with blue trim.

Although the district’s painting job included two of the school’s bathrooms, Pleasant Valley couldn’t afford to paint all nine bathrooms.

“No telling if we would ever have gotten around to it,” maintenance director Tom Goins said.

But parents said some of the restrooms were fairly hideous, with clashing green walls and pink tile.

And Bocash said she was concerned not only about the bathrooms’ appearance, but their cleanliness.

“From a health point of view, when you have a school that’s more than 30 years old, it’s hard to keep things clean,” said Bocash, who is head of the PTA’s health and safety committee.

The smells and dirt had built up, she said. “You have the little kids who forget to flush and the usual spit wads.”

With white paint purchased by the district and brushes donated by local merchants, the parents transformed the restrooms from grungy to gleaming.

Bocash and the other parents hope the fresh paint will inspire the 550 kindergarten through sixth-grade children at the school to keep the restrooms cleaner.

Cathy Sommerhauser said she thinks her two children will have a special sense of pride in the remodeled bathrooms. “They’re going to tell all their friends, ‘My mom helped paint this.’ ”

The Bocashes’ 11-year-old Patrick, who sometimes helped the adults paint, said most of his fellow students aren’t aware of the painting job. “They’ll be surprised,” he said.

The restroom painting job is only one of many parent volunteer projects in Pleasant Valley this year.

This spring, another group of Camarillo Heights parents remodeled and carpeted the teachers’ lounge.

At Dos Caminos School, parents have re-sodded the school’s lawn and bought a new sprinkler system.

And a parents’ group at Monte Vista Intermediate School planted trees and painted classrooms.

Goins said he thinks district officials sometimes forget how much they depend on parents’ help. “But without them,” he said, “we couldn’t survive.”