BOYLE HEIGHTS : Roosevelt High Gets A Needed Makeover

The changes have come slowly and not without problems, but Roosevelt High School teacher Aldo Parral hopes to continue his work to improve and brighten the 71-year-old school while boosting student pride.

Parral, who teaches English as a second language, became the school’s beautification coordinator with a little money from the school’s alumni association and help from Principal Henry Ronquillo, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre and community groups.

He recruited students to paint out graffiti, design and paint murals and pick up trash. Parral, whose efforts were interrupted this fall by his duties as football coach, will restart the beautification project when students return from winter break in January.

But already, students at the South Mathews Street school have taken notice of the 23 murals his program was responsible for painting.

“It doesn’t look like a prison any more,” one student told the school’s newspaper.

Schools throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District have suffered from budget cutbacks that have reduced the number of janitors available for basic maintenance and caused long delays in making simple repairs. Schools often must go without, or find other sources for building maintenance.

Roosevelt, with 4,600 students, benefited from a celebrity basketball game last May that raised $5,000 for the beautification efforts. Alatorre field deputy Rosa Morales, who coordinated the basketball game, has also helped secure donations from the community to improve the school.

The improvements have included painting the gazebo in the center of the school, planting grass and flowers and fixing the bleachers in the gym. The entire school was painted, inside and out--something that had not been done in 25 years.

The improvements were especially necessary because the school, one of the largest in the district, also is a meeting site for community groups, has an adult school and migrant education and after-school programs, Ronquillo said.

“There’s a lot of wear and tear on an old facility,” he said. “The school never gets to rest. That and the low budgets in the district that have brought the cutbacks in maintenance make it an uphill battle just to keep a school maintained.”

So Parral, 24, a Roosevelt alumnus, took on the task of getting students involved in the school’s upkeep.

Several students who have since graduated helped paint murals throughout the grounds depicting the school mascot, a Roughrider, and other school symbols.

Some of those have been vandalized. Parral pointed out a large painting near the football field that students over the Thanksgiving weekend poured paint on and tried to set on fire.

Mostly, though, the students have respected the murals because they know other students have painted them, he said.

The effort has not gone without criticism, mostly from teachers and staff who wanted more students involved in deciding what murals and improvements to make, Parral said.

“There was a plan to this and that was to make the school as best as you can make it,” Parral said. “But there was a lot of criticism because of the spontaneity of it.”

As he reflects on the work he and others have done, Parral points to a mural on the south end of the school in which an airbrushed scene depicts two snarling bears and a Roughrider against a background of the city’s skyline. The piece took six students 120 hours to complete.

“This is the one I’m most proud of. Just looking at it reminds me of the kids,” Parral said. “It’s still not what I want, though. The work’s not done.”