When El Toro Elementary students returned to their East Main
Avenue campus Monday morning, it looked quite a bit different than
it did when they left it Friday afternoon.
“I heard lots of oohs and aahs today,” El Toro Principal
Kathleen Masner said Monday.
When El Toro Elementary students returned to their East Main Avenue campus Monday morning, it looked quite a bit different than it did when they left it Friday afternoon.
“I heard lots of oohs and aahs today,” El Toro Principal Kathleen Masner said Monday.
On Saturday, more than 100 Comcast employees – approximately 131 – descended on the campus, armed with paintbrushes, shovels, hoes and flowers, and a whole lot of energy – to give the school a facelift.
Nearly half that number – approximately 59 – El Toro family members joined in, impressed by the enthusiasm of the workers and the organization of the project.
“When we got here at 8:30 this morning, the Comcast employees had a plan laid out,” El Toro Home and School Club President Laura Hagiperos said Saturday. “They had visited the campus before today and identified areas to work on. There are five main projects, and each project had a leader. We were assigned to a project, given shirts and identifying tags … it is extremely well organized.”
Although El Toro only celebrated its 10-year anniversary last year, the campus was showing some signs of wear and tear, most notably, the landscaping. Masner said the district gardener has always worked hard at the school, but sometimes plants die and couldn’t always be replaced.
The Morgan Hill School District has been forced to cut maintenance and landscape workers due to budget deficits over several years; the cost of replacing landscaping with a limited number of employees to maintain the effort could have been prohibitive.
“This has been something that Home & School Clubs in this district and others have done for years,” Masner said. “As well as the wider community. Often in our school plans we talk about involving the community in different ways, being open to that, and I think this is a wonderful example.”
Comcast chose El Toro to benefit from Comcast Cares Day, the company’s annual day of service, when employees, families and friends partner with local organizations nationwide on projects that benefit the communities where they live and work. For two consecutive years, Comcast Bay Area has devoted Cares Day to supporting local education, in consideration of the deep budget cuts facing California schools today.
“At Comcast, we have always believed that giving back to the community is important,” said Lori Herington, Comcast’s Education Program coordinator. “We’re extremely proud of our employees who have generously given of their time and talents to impact their neighborhoods on Comcast Cares Day to ensure our schools are the cleanest, safest, educational environments possible for our teachers and children.”
At El Toro, employees and El Toro families focused on five main project areas, including painting some parts of the school, improving the front of the school with weeding and planting flowers and plants, updating the kindergarten area with a new sandbox and a re-roofed and painted storage shed, planting a rose garden in one are of the school’s quad and replanting and weeding the school’s butterfly garden in the quad.
“I just can’t believe all the people who showed up,” said El Toro parent Maria Gutierrez, whose son Anthony is a fourth-grader.
“Everything looks so nice. This was a great thing for our school and a great experience for us.”
Home Depot in Morgan Hill gave Comcast a discount on supplies used for the spruce-up, and Erik’s Deli Cafe provided free lunches for kids and a discount to Comcast. The company purchased box lunches for all the volunteers from the restaurant.
“So many Comcast employees live and work in Morgan Hill that we felt it was very important that we support a school in our own backyard for Comcast Cares Day,” Herington said. “We ‘give back’ to the community by hiring local residents, supporting local businesses, and now, by donating to the local schools.”
