Students’ Tree Planting Brings Beauty to Area

For years, the brief stretch of Schoenborn Street between Lindley and Zelzah avenues was little more than a blighted block of earthquake-ravaged apartment buildings and a bare sidewalk.

Not anymore. With nearly all the damaged buildings repaired, 140 students from Northridge Middle School spent Thursday morning planting 26 Chinese flame trees adjacent to the 41-year-old campus.

“This is something that’s going to last,” said Gustavo Bahena, a supervisor with the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, the nonprofit group that supplied the trees and helped students with the labor. “It’s going to make a big impact on the school. It’s something to be proud of.”

For students and teachers, it’s a welcome bit of beauty on a once-drab street at the school’s southern edge.

“It looked all messy [before],” explained 12-year-old Ricardo Luna, who lives across from the school on Schoenborn Street. “Now it looks beautiful.”

The beautification effort was made possible by the Los Angeles Housing Department’s Neighborhood Recovery Program, a citywide effort to clean up areas blighted by crime and decaying housing.

Project Manager Lisa McMurray said the next step will be to install street lighting along Schoenborn, where a 16-year-old Panorama City girl was fatally shot last month.

The killing was especially tragic for the staff of Northridge Middle School, where two years ago administrators created the “peace institute,” an interdisciplinary program designed to teach children ways of settling conflicts nonviolently.

Ron Klemp, the program’s founder, said he welcomed events such as the tree-planting as a way of encouraging students to take pride in their neighborhood.

“Community-service learning is a very important way . . . to make the school a more peaceful place,” he said.