13 Valley Campuses Receive Fix-Up Grants

At Camellia Avenue Elementary School in North Hollywood, administrators will transform the rundown kindergarten playground into a vibrant new recreation area--courtesy of movie legend Kirk Douglas and his wife.

At Carpenter Avenue Elementary School in Studio City, improvements will come in the form of new trees and shrubs and a new play structure that promotes fun and physical fitness.

In all, 13 Valley schools were among 31 Los Angeles Unified School District campuses named as winners Tuesday in the first round of disbursements from the Anne and Kirk Douglas Playground Enhancement Awards.

The announcement was made at Vine Elementary School in Hollywood, where the Douglases, along with Mayor Richard Riordan and Mike Roos, president of LEARN, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, awarded the grants to representatives from each school.

The grants will be used to pay for the landscaping of playgrounds and the purchase of recreation equipment. The Douglases have contributed $1 million in private funds to the $2.5 million fund, which also received a $50,000 donation from the Riordan Foundation, established by the mayor in 1981 to help schools. Also contributing were the Wilbur May Foundation and Anita May Rosenstein.

The grants require that each school raise a matching amount.

The awards are the largest playground donations ever given to the district, and supplement funds from two other initiatives: Proposition K, a city park bond measure passed last year, and Proposition BB, a $2.4-billion bond issue for school repair and construction approved by voters this year.

“The teachers, students and parents are all excited about this. It’s a lot of money,” said Wayne Langham, the acting principal at Camellia, which will receive a total of $16,374 to redesign its kindergarten play area.

“This is a very old school. The equipment wears out and there are not a lot of bucks around to bring it up to date.”

“It’s so important that if children work hard, they play hard too,” said Anne Douglas as her husband moved through the crowd shaking hands and posing for pictures with the more than 40 guests out on the asphalt court of Vine Elementary.

To one person who mistakenly called the award the “Kirk and Anne Douglas award,” Kirk Douglas took exception: “It’s my wife who is the general of this operation,” he said.

Anne Douglas said she came up with the idea of giving money to fix up school playgrounds when she read a story in The Times that many are in poor condition.

“If there are children learning, then we owe them recreational facilities to keep them stimulated and eager to be educated,” she said.

The grants of up to $25,000 will be presented annually until 2000 to any district school that belongs to the LEARN program or is involved in other reform programs, such as accelerated and charter schools.

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Rimbert is a Times staff writer and Satzman a correspondent.