Students’ Summer Project: Building a Habitat Home

Clad in Nikes and designer jeans, they make an unusual--and tentative--construction crew.

But the enthusiasm, if not the experience, was there. On Saturday, the project that several dozen high school students had conceived in August finally began taking shape.

The teenagers started work on the frame of a house--a house that will soon be home to a low-income family--in a South Los Angeles neighborhood.

“Our goal was huge and incredibly simple,” said Jonah Lehrer, 17, a junior at North Hollywood High School. “We wanted to build a home for someone that needed it.”

After 10 months of fund-raising and organizing, the first Habitat for Humanity home initiated by high school students was underway on 96th Street, just off Central Avenue.

“This is something good and something tangible,” said Eliot Abel, 17, an Oakwood High School junior who was a driving force behind the Habitat for Humanity high school initiative. “When we’re done, we’ll be able to drive by, point to the house and say, ‘Look, we did that.’ ”

To do it took $68,000, raised entirely by students from six Southland high schools. There were penny drives and dances, grant proposals and aluminum recycling. Finally, the money was raised and “the good part,” the construction, began.

All summer long, students will head to the construction site to saw, hammer and nail the home together. They will be joined by the home’s future occupants, the six-member Gutierrez family, and a few construction leaders with experience putting buildings together.

“It’s good to actually be working on the house,” said Abel, as he eased a massive drill bit into a foundation board. “Enough with the grant proposals.”

But the success of those grant proposals, along with school fund-raisers, has raised hopes for involving high school students elsewhere in home-building drives.

Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for low-income families, has relationships with churches, college students and countless community groups. But this is the first time high school students, most with little more experience than wood shop classes, have led an effort.

“There was a longing in the students to build something, construct something,” said David Tokofsky, a Los Angeles Unified School District board member. “We hope to turn this into a national campaign where each high school will have a Habitat for Humanity chapter.”

The Oakwood and North Hollywood High students are working with teenagers from Marlborough, Marshall, Venice and Polytechnic High Schools.