Help? A Ton : 4,000 Volunteers Roll Up Their Sleeves to Spruce Up Schools, Community Centers

Spurred on by actor Richard Dreyfuss and Los Angeles School Supt. Sid Thompson, nearly 4,000 volunteers spent a sunny Saturday aiding the area’s youth in a citywide Help-a-Thon, cleaning and landscaping schools, planting trees and designing murals.

“How wonderful it is to see you all here,” Dreyfuss told an enthusiastic crowd gathered at 8:30 a.m. at Exposition Park, the starting point for the day’s activities. “How good it is to be able to take control, to know you can improve the city.”

Thompson thanked the volunteers for giving up part of their weekend because “we don’t have the resources we need to keep the schools the way we’d like to.”

Stretching from San Pedro to Pacoima, the service project was organized by L.A. Works, a nonprofit organization founded in 1991 by entertainment executives and other corporate leaders to increase volunteer participation in Los Angeles and encourage people to get involved in the community.

“This allows people to be part of the solution; it gives them a sense of empowerment,” said Tanner Methvin, executive director of L.A. Works. “People see problems all over, but often they don’t know how or where to get involved. We organize this project where all people have to do is show up and be ready to help.”

Dianne Green, a clerk at a downtown law firm, said she came for a real simple reason: “I wanted to put my money where my mouth is.”

At South Central’s Fremont High School, one of the city’s oldest schools, scores of Pacific Bell employees wearing bright turquoise T-shirts, painted the football bleachers and the cafeteria, and they planted trees.

Assistant Principal Jackie Furby, toting a walkie-talkie, was positively beaming as she roamed the huge campus, checking to see whether the 200 volunteers needed water, Band-Aids or additional equipment.

In addition to schools, some of the volunteers toiled at other nonprofit, youth-serving organizations, including the Challenger Boys and Girls Club, just south of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. “With all this help, we can get things done in one day that would have taken months otherwise,” said Lou Dantzler, Challenger’s founder and executive director.

Although many people came as part of organized groups from companies such as Sumitomo Bank, Kodak and Home Depot, some volunteers came on their own. Harold Varner, owner of a Northridge painting company, just showed up with his 13 employees and his wife, Leticia, to help paint Monroe High in North Hills, after he heard about the event on the radio.

“What you give, you get back in return,” Varner said. “It doesn’t cost me anything to do things like this and we heard this school needed a lot of help, and we can give it, so why not.”

Across the San Fernando Valley, parents, students, teachers and business people teamed up at eight schools to prune bushes, pull weeds, plant trees and flowers and paint buildings, doors and classrooms and repair anything else they could.

Most of the volunteers were from the nearby area. But there were also others like Marilyn Sano of Westchester who had a 30-minute bus ride to Van Nuys before adding a coat of bright golden yellow paint to Cohasset Elementary School’s drab and dingy looking doors.

Gregorio Saldate, 9, and his friend William, 11, worked together to transform a weed-choked section of the yard at Fullbright Elementary School in Canoga Park into the beginnings of a student-run vegetable garden. Although they were looking forward to planting radishes, carrots and lettuce, they were particularly pleased about the physical make-over of their school.

“It was all ugly before, with weeds and things,” said William, a 5th-grader. “It looked all gloomy cause of the chipping paint and stuff, and now it’s real bright and clean,”

In toto, Methvin said, the volunteers painted 680 walls and murals and planted more than 18,000 trees, flowers and shrubs at 34 facilities.

At day’s end, the volunteers were treated to a picnic sponsored by Ben & Jerry’s, Ralphs and Taco Bell.