VALLEY REPORT / SCHOOL LAYOFFS : Cutbacks Jeopardize Vocational, Elective Classes : Campus Oasis May Wither Without Landscape Teacher

Win Hainbuch and his students at Sun Valley Junior High School come from different worlds, but they have one thing in common: a love of nature.

Hainbuch, a German-born horticulturist, found refuge from the Allied bombing raids of World War II in the lush forests outside his hometown of Frankfurt, where he would go fishing with his grandfather.

Now, nearly 50 years later, Hainbuch’s horticulture students have built an oasis of their own in a crime-ridden neighborhood under the roar of jets landing at nearby Burbank Airport.

Over the past five years, nearly 1,300 students have transformed three acres of school land on the southeast corner of campus from a patch of weeds into a blossoming botanical garden featuring a pond, an orchard, vegetables, palm trees and even a tiny, nine-hole golf course.

“There is nothing like this in the entire community,” Hainbuch, 52, said proudly as he surveyed the garden’s neatly tended habitat. “This garden belongs to the kids. Everything you see here the kids have done.”

But the garden may once again succumb to weeds, vandalism and neglect if the Los Angeles school district follows through with plans to dismiss Hainbuch, who is among about 1,000 district employees who received preliminary layoff notices in March. The district must issue final layoff notices by June 15.

Hainbuch’s departure could deprive students of practical training in landscaping and take away a source of physical and mental rejuvenation.

“After being stuffed up in five classrooms of work, you come out here and it feels great,” said Khachick Agazaryan, 15, a ninth-grader who has taken Hainbuch’s horticulture and agriculture classes for the past two years. “He put a lot of hard work into this place and so did the students. I wouldn’t like to see it be torn down.”

Hainbuch moved with his family from Germany to Toronto when he was 12. He graduated from UCLA in 1974 with a degree in ecosystems and worked as a landscaping consultant before joining the district in 1978. He taught agriculture for six years at a junior high school in Gardena, took a two-year hiatus from teaching, then joined the Sun Valley Junior High staff in 1986.

His students have won numerous awards and accolades, including a first-place award from Los Angeles Beautiful Inc., a group formed to encourage quality landscaping, for beautifying and landscaping a bus stop on a once-blighted section of San Fernando Road at Vineland Avenue. Mayor Tom Bradley and state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana), among others, have bestowed their blessings on the program.

This year, students undertook a beautification project at Sherman Way and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. They spruced up a forlorn bus stop, using railroad ties to build a retaining wall for an embankment that they covered with bird of paradise plants, California poppies and pine trees. Stairs lead from the sidewalk to a bus bench atop the embankment.

“Now it’s a nice, aesthetic, pleasing bus stop,” Hainbuch said.

The school garden features hundreds of plant species, from cacti to pine trees to grapes. The class teaches students to be resourceful, since Hainbuch must make do with a budget of $500 per year.

For example, a physical education teacher at the school who also runs a Jacuzzi business got Hainbuch a good price on a water pump, which the students installed last week to build a waterfall.

In another part of the garden, brilliant bougainvillea adorns a dirt mound formed from a pile of garbage.

Perhaps most important, Hainbuch said, the garden teaches self-confidence and respect for the environment. It encourages students to choose gardening over gangs, he said.

“They’re not going to destroy it because they made it,” Hainbuch said. “For example, the kids built a barbecue. It’s the Leaning Barbecue of Sun Valley, but it’s their barbecue. It’s never going to get destroyed.”