Crusade of the 6th Graders

I’m at a death penalty conference. More on that later. But in the meantime…. Here’s a story about some local kids who are fighting to get the grown-ups to do the right thing:

Yesterday at five in the morning, a van full of eleven Topanga Canyon six graders (plus four mother-type chaperones) left on a road trip to Sacramento to deliver a petition containing 16,831 signatures asking Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger not to shut down Topanga State Park—and the other state parks, for that matter, one out of five of which are scheduled for closure.

Topanga Elementary School encourages its sixth graders to come up with a class projects. So this year, a bunch of the six graders decided they wanted to…well…. change the world. Or more specifically, they wanted to save the park. The students themselves collected around 1000 of the 16,000 plus signatures. (Local parent organizers got the rest) And then, with the help of one of the school’s teachers, they made a CD full of original songs that they sold to community members in order to raise the necessary bucks to rent the van and pay for the gasoline for the Sac’to trip. (I believe the four mothers agreed to work pro bono, my across the street neighbor Christina, among them, since her son Lorenzo was one of the Topanga 11. )

The closure of 48 of the state’s parks is a hideously penny wise, pound foolish idea. More specifically, closing all 48 would save just $13.3 million out of a budget shortfall of $16 billion. (The rest of the facts and the numbers pertaining to the issue can be found here.)

All the parks deserve to be protected. But Topanga’s 13,000 acres are unique in that they make up the largest wildland park in America that is within the boundaries of a U.S. metropolitan city. Topanga State Park is visited by more than half a million people each year (and those are just the folks who come in the front door). Inner city classes come there, LA County’s most famous 10K is run there, people get married there, little kids have birthday parties there (instead of at Chuck E Cheese). It features 50 miles of hiker/biker/rider trails within driving distance from downtown LA….and on and on.

Oh, yeah, and not maintaining chaparral haunted parks like Topanga would add to the fire danger in a year that promises to be far more dangerous that last year’s awful fire season.

In short, shutting it down is an appalling idea. But it was not an issue that seemed to much interest the media—what with all the education cuts and the never-ending primary and all.

However the Topanga kids and their road trip have generated publicity both on radio and TV.

I, for one, am pretty damn proud of them.