Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Answers a School’s Call for Help : Cooperation: Residents of a nearby apartment complex now keep watch over a tiny campus playground once littered with trash and bottles.

Students and teachers at the Waldorf School of the Oaks in Thousand Oaks cherish their tiny playground, which boasts four swings, a slide, jungle gym and a towering tree for the children to climb.

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So do their neighbors, residents of a crowded apartment complex on Warwick Avenue with no park of their own.

But it has not always been that way.

Teachers used to find broken bottles and trash littering the park when they came to the school in the morning, rubbish they believed was left by neighborhood youths. When someone broke into a shed and stole the school’s earthquake kits earlier this year, administrators knew they had to take action.

“Our first thought was we worked so hard, and someone is ruining all this,” acting administrator Angela Karaiskos said. “We talked about locking the playground, but that wasn’t the way we wanted to react.”

Instead, school officials decided to extend an invitation to their neighbors and ask them to think of the park as their own. “We wanted them to feel care for the space,” Karaiskos said. “You don’t go throwing trash in your own back yard.”

It has been seven months since the school sent out a letter asking nearby residents to care for and keep watch over the park, and the school has not been vandalized since then.

“These are people who get it,” said Colleen Briner-Schmidt, a member of the United Church of Christ, which owns the property housing the school and park. “You either include everyone in your community, or they’re outsiders, and outsiders don’t care if they trash your community. Outsiders don’t care what you think.”

The decision to make neighbors of the school insiders was a long process, said parents and teachers who met with church and Ventura County Sheriff’s Department officials to solve the problem.

The Sheriff’s Department agreed to increase patrols of the area, and the church installed motion sensor lights. But parent Kelly Heller said the group poured the most effort into the letter.

“We spent a long time writing this really nice letter. We had four revisions,” said Heller, who dropped off the letters at each apartment and offered to explain, in Spanish, that the park was theirs to use.

“We didn’t want to blame the people next door,” she said. “We weren’t even sure it was them.” The school received no responses, except for the children playing there every afternoon and a stop to the vandalism.

“Most of the people living next door are families and like to use the park,” said Elizabeth Shahbazi, who taught at the school last year but is taking time off while her 4-year-old attends.

The neighbors like it, too. Beatriz Hernandez, 12, said when she and her friends come to play and see a mess, “We come back with brooms to clean up our little park.”

Shahbazi said she hopes the school puts on an open house this year so the neighbors can meet each other face to face.

“We’re glad this park gets used,” Shahbazi said. “Children need a place to play that they can get to from their home without having to ask their parents to take them to the park. Giving children something to do benefits everyone.”