All things bright and beautiful now

It was a taggers' paradise, but local college students have reclaimed Randwick Park. Rowena Orejana reports.
The students painted over the skatepark in Randwick Park last week.
Even on a cloudy day the bright yellows, blues and oranges of the skatepark stood out as sunny beacons to tempt kids to come out to play.
Upon closer inspection, however, one can see that the cheerful skatepark has already been marred again by tagging.
"It's sort of a let-down, like all that hard work down the drain,'' says Kauri Grace, one of the Year 9 students from Alfriston College who painted the park last week.
Brooke Blackburn - another member of the painting group - is also disappointed but resolved to deal with the culprit.
"It's knowing that we actually know the people who did the tagging,'' she says. "I'm going to talk to this guy in school because I know who did it.''
The time, the vision and the effort invested in the park has given these young people a sense of ownership of this community property. In this sense, the "authentic learning'' the school and Manukau Beautification
Trust wanted to teach these children
has proven very successful.
"The kids hate [the tagging],'' says Belinda Matthews, assistant head of learning. "There is a real ownership of the things that they have done and that's what we really want to inspire in them.''
Kauri, who lives nearby, comes to the park every day. "Every time we came here, there was a lot of broken glass in there so we couldn't play around here. We got bored real
quick. We just thought we'd clean it up,'' he says.
The Year 9 students took the "horrible and dirty'' park under their wing and tackled the project with much enthusiasm.
"One even wanted to put a Fear Fall and a train ride here,'' Kauri says with a grin. "But we had to be realistic.''
The students made a field trip to Sir Barry Curtis Park to have a point of comparison.
They noted which ideas were achievable and which would be discarded.
"We were on a budget of $5000. We had to stick with it,'' says Brooke.
The project became so much bigger, however, that the initial budget became irrelevant.
The students learned how to make presentations to business groups as well as the city council. They managed to get support from councillor Colleen Brown, who promised to put in a web, a climbing frame similar to the one at Curtis Park. Grateful as they are, the
youngsters have learned that the council proceeds at a pace different from their own.
"It's a learning curve,'' shrugs Mrs Matthews, who explains that what had started out as a term project has now become a four-year project of their whanau, Kaitataki. This means successive Year 9 KT students will take over the project.
"part of our community values that we really hold dear. The school tries to instill in them the value of caring for your own.''