Editorial

Volunteers improving high school facilities

If you want the job done right, then do it yourself. It's that kind of common-sense approach that has inspired a small group of individuals to accomplish big things of late on the campus at Los Gatos High School.

It's not that things were not being done properly at the school--it's just that without community involvement, there's only so much that school officials can accomplish. So volunteers have stepped forward in a number of different arenas to make certain that the state of the school will be state of the art.

Construction on the Los Gatos campus means that classrooms will be brand-new--and very empty. Bond dollars pay for the buildings, but not for what goes inside. So in stepped Joanne Rodgers and the volunteers in the Millennium Project, who have raised more than $200,000. The money will be dispersed in the form of grants for teachers so that they might fill their classrooms with new equipment to enhance the learning process at the school.

Improvements were needed on the high school baseball field, so Ron Denevi resurrected Friends of Wildcat Baseball, an organization formed years earlier to upgrade the facility. Under Denevi's leadership, more than $300,000 in cash and materials has been donated to bring about significant improvements to the school's diamond.

The school pool is more than 45 years old and not up to current standards for aquatic competition, so a new pool has been proposed. Now, that new facility could be a swimming pool, or it could be a multi-functional aquatics complex. Enter Michael McMurray and the Los Gatos Community Pool Foundation, and plans have been submitted for a state-of-the-art facility. The group has raised $1.2 million of the $2.5 million needed to complete the project.

The need to form such groups seems to signal a sign of the times in schools today. It's a time when we can no longer sit back and wait for the school districts to free up the dollars to make site improvements when they are struggling to keep up classroom facilities. And when further upgrades are needed to complete a facility, it's up to such community groups to provide the support for those enhancements.

These are certainly not do-it-yourself projects, but the do-it-yourself spirit of a few individuals has been the guiding force behind improving the quality of educational life for all of the students at the high school.

Swimming, baseball, orchestra, drama, debate and other such extracurricular activities are as much a part of the high school experience as reading, writing and arithmetic. Sure, the academic endeavor is the most important aspect of school life--the foundation for everything else. But the other activities contribute greatly to the creation of well-rounded individuals who take away more from their high school life than just what they learned in a science class.

Thank goodness there are those folks like Ron Denevi, Michael McMurry, Joanne Rogers and the other dedicated volunteers who realize that.

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