School Graffiti Crew Does Gardening, Too

Think of them as your garden-variety graffiti busters.

They plant. They weed. They mow. They spray for bugs. They trim trees. They repair sprinkler systems. And, of course, they paint. Oh, do they paint.

For the past two years at Chase Street Elementary School, the Panorama City Graffiti Busters have done all those things, and more, about every other week. Basically, they’ve taken over grounds maintenance duties at the school for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Walter Schulte, one of the Busters, explained how the arrangement started a couple of years ago, when the weeds were knee-high and Chase Street looked like a cemetery for dead sofas.

“I called down to the school board, and I said, ‘Look, this is our neighborhood school. We will not accept a school that looks bad,’ ” said Schulte, a longtime Panorama City resident. “They said they’d check into it. I said: ‘OK, you check into it. We’ll do something about it.’ ”

They cleaned up the street. They got rid of abandoned furniture and other items dumped near the school. They spruced up the playground and painted over graffiti. They inspected the underground sprinkler system, replaced pipes, heads, valves. (A couple of Busters are retired plumbers.)

A Home Depot store donated some cleaning and plumbing materials. A gas station donated gas for the mower. The Busters kept going back.

“They’re incredible,” said Principal Diana Villafana. “When I came here four years ago, the district used to send out a gardening crew. But then they stopped, and put all the grounds maintenance responsibilities on the shoulders of our plant manager.”

But the 46-year-old school sits on nine acres and serves 770 children, and a lot of things didn’t get done. That’s when the Graffiti Busters stepped in.

“To me, what’s different about this is there’s a real sense of community around this school,” Villafana said. “People know what we’re trying to accomplish.”