Volunteers Fix Up Balboa Middle School : Education: Employees of Kinko’s Northwest join community members and students to clean, coat and cultivate at the homely Ventura campus.

It wasn’t pretty. But that was exactly what a small army of painters and planters expected Saturday morning when they converged on Balboa Middle School.

Bolstered by nearly 200 volunteers from Ventura-based Kinko’s Northwest, teachers, parents and students provided a much-needed face lift to the aging east Ventura campus.

Peeling paint was concealed by a fresh coat of something called Whisper Gray. The trampled lawn in the school’s central courtyard was torn out and replaced with neat squares of sod.

Windows were washed. Sidewalks and playgrounds were swept and scraped of gum and gunk. Plants and bushes were cut back or cut out and exchanged for new ones.

In all, volunteers took part Saturday in dozens of beautification projects at the 1,200-student campus, the largest of the four middle schools in the Ventura Unified School District.

“This is absolutely overwhelming,” said Principal Helena T. Reaves, who helped bring about the large-scale cleanup effort. “It’s just wonderful to have all this support and all this help. You need to have a beautiful environment for students and staff. It supports learning.”

The idea was born last summer at a Kinko’s Northwest company picnic.

Looking for a community-improvement project to coincide with the company’s annual December meeting, Kinko’s officials set out to find a Ventura school in need of a make-over. After some searching, the homely Balboa campus became the target.

The school building is a one-story structure painted battleship gray and streaked with dark blue trim. Students circulate rumors that it once was a women’s prison, although there is no truth to that.

What is true is that the school was in desperate need of some tender loving care.

“Virtually every single person in the company signed up to do this,” said marketing Director Dean Zatkowsky, noting that Kinko’s worldwide headquarters also is based in Ventura.

“It’s a high-energy group and they just wanted to go for it. I don’t know if we are going to help that much, but we’re going to give it some accents.”

From the hallways to the athletic fields, volunteers did their best to beautify Balboa.

Julia Cox, a 13-year-old eighth-grader, joined her mother, Betty De La Cruz, in sweeping the school’s asphalt basketball courts.

“I’m glad to see everyone out here today, excited about cleaning up Balboa,” Julia said. “I’m really getting into the whole community-service thing.”

At the school gym, Kinko’s employee Shelley Eggert slapped fresh paint on walls that had been faded and scarred by graffiti.

“I thought it was a great idea,” said Eggert, a branch office manager in Anchorage. Kinko’s Northwest operates 65 branch offices in Northern California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.

“I think it’s important to give back to the community you’re in, and I think Kinko’s philosophy is very much that.”

Using that same reasoning, Oxnard nursery owner Rudy Vis persuaded fellow horticulturists to donate hundreds of plants to the effort. Then, he showed up Saturday morning to pour some good old-fashioned hard work into the beautification project.

“It was an opportunity to contribute, and this was the kind of thing I could help out with,” said Vis, whose 12-year-old daughter, Renee, is a sixth-grader at Balboa. “And it makes kids feel good about their school.”

Even top executives got into the act, including Kinko’s Northwest Chief Executive Officer Brad Krause. He joined half a dozen other employees unearthing a long-jump pit that had become choked with weeds.

“I would say we want to continue this in whatever communities we are in,” he said. “It feels like can kind of give something back to those places that support us.”