True Experts--Kids--Design a Playground

It began with the second-grade teacher’s simple suggestion that, for a treat, his students could romp on play equipment at the core of a nearby public housing project.

When their reaction was less than positive--to wit: “Eeew no. Not there !”--Compton Avenue Elementary School teacher John Gust took a closer look.

What he saw at the Hacienda Village housing complex was a graffiti-marred roundabout, slouching monkey bars, an eight-station swing set with only two intact seats and a rusting slide ladder that led nowhere.

With consent and funding from the Housing Authority of the city of Los Angeles, which runs the housing development, Gust turned redesigning the play area into a summer project for his school’s urban, after-school 4-H Club.

From a friend of Gust, a fellow teacher with an architecture degree, the 25 club members learned how to read plans, develop an architectural theme and craft a multifaceted play area that could accommodate children of different ages and those with physical disabilities.

“This will be good for the little kids, don’t you think?” said Darin Brusiter, 9, as he nudged a thumb-sized drawing of a bubble panel toward the toddler end of the plan-in-progress.

The project also was a rare opportunity for youngsters to improve their own environment. Though many of them live in the neighborhood--some in the housing project itself--they say they have rarely played on the old equipment.

“My friend lives over there and [the playground] is dirty,” said Terrion Haywood, 7. “I go to another park where they don’t have brown sand.”

Last week, inside a stuffy auditorium at the school, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified district, the student architects presented their final drawings to Housing Authority officials.

Drawn in the shape of a clover to reflect the 4-H logo, their proposal includes a spiral slide, a crawl tunnel, a clatter bridge, a transfer station for wheelchair users and Darin’s bubble panel.

It will cost about $80,000 to build, a sum far out of reach of the 4-H Club’s budget. But Gust had good timing. His contact with the Housing Authority coincided with a $29-million modernization project at the city’s 21 public housing projects, which includes a special emphasis on playgrounds.

“I did a tour of our developments a year and a half ago . . . and I couldn’t find any playgrounds,” said Housing Authority Director Don Smith. “So when John Gust called me up about this, I said, ‘Great!’ ”

Likewise, the 4-H Clubs of Los Angeles, now 20 clubs strong, embraced the idea as the perfect marriage of public agencies. Though 4-H is known for its rural emphasis, the decline of the family farm caused the organization to expand into cities. It began its first urban club in Los Angeles in 1988 and is starting similar programs in Kansas City, Philadelphia and Oakland this summer.

Originally, Gust had hoped Compton Avenue Elementary’s young club members could help build the play area they designed. But liability worries intervened. Instead, the Housing Authority construction crew--including some residents hired from within the project--will begin work, following the children’s specifications, in August.

When club members return to school in the fall, they will help plant the landscaping.

That planting will be the culmination of an intensive three-week design process, which began in mid-June with a trip across East 104th Street to the job site. There, Meghan McChesney, who started teaching in the neighboring Compton Unified School District through President Clinton’s Americorps program after earning an architecture degree last year, asked the youngsters to photograph and measure the playground, and record their impressions.

“I see some swings all tangled up,” wrote fifth-grader Victor Gipson. “I see a big sandbox with nothing there and something like horses and a merry-go-round all banged up.”

Before the students put mechanical pencil to graph paper, McChesney taught a lesson in reading plans, using apple as props. She asked them to look down on an apple from above, then sketch its “roof plan.” Next, they drew the front view, its “elevation.” Finally they cut through the apple: horizontally, drawing its “plan”; then vertically, drawing its “section.”

Then they ate the apples.

“These are kind of hard concepts if you don’t have something they can touch,” McChesney said.

But instruction in architectural terms was secondary to a broader lesson about teamwork and consensus-building. After reviewing catalogues from playground suppliers, the club members had to agree on which equipment to use and why. They broke into four teams, devised four plans using photocopies of the equipment, and boiled the four down to one in time for Friday’s presentation. No easy feat for opinionated youngsters.

The resulting team spirit is Gust’s insurance plan for shielding the new play area from the vandalism that ruined its predecessor. This is of particular concern in a housing project where scheduled modernization measures include attaching bars to windows and installing bulletproof street lights.

“We’re hoping that by getting the kids who live here involved, they and their parents will be responsible for it,” Gust said.

The junior architects expressed a willingness to do whatever they can to protect their work, but also some skepticism as to whether they are up to the task. They and other youngsters who use the existing playground blame previous ravaging on teen-age gang members.

“Gangbangers might mess this up too,” Darin said, shrugging. “They think they can be boss of everything.”