Alumni Answer the Cal : Berkeley Grads Give Dreary Children’s Center a New Look

Every member of the crew in this sandbox had a college degree.

Hauling sand in a little red wagon but working with grown-up shovels, the five UC Berkeley graduates attempted Saturday to turn the play area at the Figueroa Child Development Center into something more than the giant litter box it had become.

Inside the small, weary day-care center, other volunteers sanded and scraped the pockmarked blue walls and painted them anew in Navajo white. The playground was raked and swept, and there was excited talk of planting flowering vines to hide the bleak chain-link fence surrounding it.

The dozen-plus Cal graduates--a group that included lawyers, real estate brokers and engineers--have never met the 19 low-income children who attend the Santa Ana center after school. But they labored all day Saturday as if the day-care facility were their own neighborhood center, instead of a once-neglected outpost that the county was forced to take over three months ago.

The volunteer face lift was part of the second annual “Cal in the Community” program, a statewide effort by the school’s alumni groups to donate time to public projects, and the first such undertaking by the 400-member Orange County chapter.

“We got educated at probably the best public institution in the country--Berkeley--so we figure it’s the least we can do to give back,” said Alan Thaler, a 1976 graduate who practices law in Costa Mesa and heads the Orange County chapter of the California Alumni Assn.

The revamping of the three-room Figueroa center began in July, when state education officials asked the county take it over from operators who allowed ineligible children to attend, said Ellin Chariton, director of child development services for the Orange County Department of Education. The after-school program is open to low-income children whose parents are working, enrolled in training programs or actively seeking jobs.

The new operators found the center in disrepair, Chariton said. “It was bad, really bad. It smelled. There were food drippings in the kitchen. The bathrooms were stained,” she said.

County officials bought new tables and chairs. Teacher Lydia Lemonnier said she threw out the moldy bread in the emergency-food box and tossed worn blankets and pillows.

But more work remained. The sky-blue walls inside needed repainting. The playground needed weeding. The sandbox was packed rock hard and apparently favored by neighborhood cats.

Thaler said it sounded like an ideal project for his group. And so, Berkeley graduates from the 1950s to the 1990s pushed wheelbarrows, climbed ladders, ground old paint and strained tired knees pulling weeds Saturday.

“That’s the job for the Class of 80-something,” concluded Jean Kulemin, a Fountain Valley real-estate broker who graduated in 1958.

Most of the volunteers said they were drawn to the project by the chance for involvement in the community, a switch from the alumni club’s usual offerings of concert outings and bed-and-breakfast packages for the Cal-Stanford football game.

“To me, you feel like you’re doing a little something to help out,” said 1984 graduate Andy Nishida, an Irvine environmental engineer whose license plates read “GOCAL84.” Nishida said he used to give old clothes and spare change to Berkeley’s homeless but never considered himself an activist at a school once synonymous with the word.

“I decided I wanted to do more things and get more involved,” Nishida said as he broke up clumps of old playground sand with a shovel.

By early afternoon, the fruits of their work were beginning to show. The classroom--with an island of toys and books piled high in the middle--was shades brighter, the result of fresh paint and clean windows. The sandbox was filled with new, clean sand. The playground’s rim was weedless.

“It’s going to look like a real place, a place you’d send your kids,” Thaler said.

Of course, there remained the inoperable outdoor drinking fountain and faulty bathroom faucets. But Lemonnier was already looking forward to the students’ reaction to their school’s face lift, a gift from total strangers.