Patchwork Playground

Confronted with a vast black sea of asphalt to play on, the children at Serrania Avenue School do their cartwheels quickly, trying to yank their hands from the hot pavement before they’re burned.

Janet Katleman, whose two children attend Serrania, remembers watching students playing in the searing heat when she moved to the area six years ago. They would turn cartwheels and shout “Ow, ow, ow!” as their hands touched the ground.

“I turned to my husband, and I said, ‘My kids are never coming here,’ ” she recalled.

Impressed by the school’s teachers, Katleman later changed her mind. The asphalt playground still rankled, though, and last year when a group of parents heard about a program to replace a swath of blacktop with grass, they leaped at the chance.

Led by parents, the elementary school applied for a $25,000 grant from a fund set up by actor Kirk Douglas and his wife, Anne, to refurbish aging playgrounds. Serrania was one of 17 San Fernando Valley schools that won a grant this year, but the school didn’t stop there. Corralling a team of volunteer contractors, parents like Katleman squeezed about $75,000 worth of work out of the original award.

“It’s been an absolute wonderment,” said Richard Engler, a Serrania father who helped lead the playground project. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think so many diverse organizations would help us.”

A former landscape contractor, Engler asked his old pals at the California Landscape Contractors Assn. to pitch in. Soon, more than 15 contractors from around the Valley were lining up to help. Friends of Serrania, a school fund-raising group, contributed $10,000.

Inside Carol Bonelli’s first-grade classroom, the excitement of the front loaders growling their way across the schoolyard seeped into her lesson plan. The children read the 1939 classic “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” and then made crayon drawings of the earth-movers.

“They were so in awe of what was going on out here,” Bonelli said.

Olivia Donnelly, 6, said she couldn’t wait to play in the grass all the adults had been talking about for weeks.

“If I fall down, I won’t hurt myself,” she said. Skinned knees and elbows are a common complaint among Serrania’s 700 students, and Olivia was no exception.

“I’ve got one right there still,” she said, rubbing a tiny knee.

Her classmate Veronica Gamm was already planning her first flying tackle on the new lawn, which will be finished within two weeks.

“I’ll get to do wrestling with Briana and Damian on the ground,” she said happily. Veronica went on to explain that her twin sister, Briana, often helped her pin down Damian.

The 23,600-square-foot playground will be the only green patch on a 4-acre stretch of asphalt. And it will be built to stay green, with an automatic sprinkler system watering the lawn. The area will also include trees and a crushed-gravel running track.

The contractors weren’t the only ones to volunteer their services. Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski’s office rustled up an asphalt recycling company--Cyclean of Los Angeles--that hauled away more than 500 tons of broken asphalt for free. The company had planned to recycle it, but found the material contained too much clay.

After a flurry of phone calls by Katleman, Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley agreed to let the school dump the asphalt there. Meanwhile, school district workers who were on campus to install a sewer system also put in a water line to irrigate the playground.

“Having the grass is going to be such a blessing for them,” said Ileana De Monte, a third-grade teacher. “It will be interesting to see if there’s a decrease in knee-scabbing.”

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For now, the playground will remain an open field without monkey bars and other equipment. Future fund-raisers may yield enough money to buy these accessories within two years, Katleman said.

Robert Mundhenk, a Santa Clarita contractor who is overseeing the project, said the wide-eyed curiosity of the children who gather to watch his crew work is thanks enough.

“I’m a sucker for kids,” he admitted. “I would have loved to have had some grass to play on when I was their age. I grew up on asphalt too.”