Kaiser Permanente restores bit of San Leandro HS history on MLK Day of Service

A 50-foot-by-ten-foot student-painted mural, hidden in storage for eight years, is back on display at the San Leandro High School cafeteria, thanks to Kaiser Permanente volunteers from the new San Leandro Medical Center who re-installed the mural during the 2016 Dr. Martin Luther King Junior “Day of Service” project at the high school.
“It’s beautiful,” exclaimed School Chief Custodian Lucy Rynearson, who worked to keep the mural safe and protected for eight years. “It was taken down from our library when that building was enlarged in 2008.”
Rynearson did her best to keep the multiple panels of the mural stored in a custodian’s closet at the school. There hadn’t been any plans to put it back up until the Kaiser Permanente volunteers agreed to do it during the MLK Day event.
“We are so excited to see it all come together,” said Dr. Robert Greenberg, Physician-in-Chief at the Kaiser Permanente San Leandro Medical Center. Greenberg was part of the medical center volunteer team that repaired and re-installed the giant mural.
Dr. Greenberg and his team came to volunteer on the MLK Holiday, intending to do some general sprucing up – painting, cleaning, organizing -and found instead the multiple mural panels on the cafeteria floor.
“It looked like a lot of puzzle pieces when we first walked in,” recalled Dr. Greenberg, although the school did provide a “road map” showing how the pieces all went together. “But after eight years of storage, many of the panels needed some touching up.”
Dr. Greenberg, an Emergency Department physician, said the mural was originally painted by students who’d long since departed the school. It was displayed in the library for several years. Reassembling the mural was a bit of a challenge, as was touching up some of the minor damages.
“I tried to maintain the same color palate as the original,” said Dr. Greenberg, who is seen in photos mixing paint to apply to the panels. The panels were then hoisted, handed to school workers standing on a scissor lift. They installed the murals high up on the cafeteria wall.
Finally put together, the colorful mural painted on large panels portrays aspects of student life at San Leandro high: various students are depicted reading, painting, involved in sports, and there’s a gowned figure seen following a path towards a graduation cap.
“I think it speaks to just how motivated and aware the San Leandro high school students were at that time,” said Dr. Greenberg, who points out that the mural includes an image of Barack Obama, who, at the time, was only a candidate for President.
Dr. Greenberg’s team spent six hours working on the mural during the holiday. Meanwhile, other Kaiser Permanente San Leandro Medical Center volunteers worked on improvement projects around the school, painting and cleaning. Many students came in to help.
“We served lunch in the cafeteria to all the volunteers, and when the kids saw the mural, they were just amazed,” said Dr. Greenberg.
Also amazed was the school’s art teacher, who’s now going to try to find the long-since-graduated artists back to see their work “re-discovered”.
“We’ve been talking about getting the mural back up for a while,” said Rynearson, bursting with pride, “but it was Kaiser Permanente that finally did the job.”