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About 50 volunteers from AbbVie Inc., which has a new presence in Pleasanton, recently came together at Donlon Elementary School where they helped build several new play structures for future students.
The pharmaceutical company — the sixth largest in the nation — collaborated with the Pleasanton Partnerships in Education Foundation in order to spend most of the day on June 29 fixing up the school as part of the company’s employee giveback program.
The AbbVie Gives Back program is an annual tradition that focuses on the company giving back to the community in which they work, according to PPIE Executive Director Andrea Wilson.
“This project is very exciting for our district, and Donlon Elementary,” Wilson said in a press release to the Weekly. “We welcome AbbVie to Pleasanton and look forward to continuing to partner with them. They are excited to jump right into their new community.”
According to Wilson, some of the projects the group of volunteers worked on last week included a life-sized chess board, new wooden pits for kids to play gaga ball (which is an updated version of dodgeball) and renovated ball walls to replace the old ones, which were falling apart.
They also cleaned and removed weeds from the school’s rock garden and updated the teachers staff area with new paint.
Apart from the physical improvements to the school, the company also put together supply kits for each student in the fall that include new grade level books and school supplies.
“When PPIE approached us about facilitating this project, the wheels began to turn,” Donlon principal Janet Gates said in the PPIE press release. “Through our collaboration with the AbbVie team, we have created some exciting new surprises for when our nearly 750 students return in August.”
Thank you to Superintendent Haglund and Trustee Carreon for joining us at Donlon for our ribbon cutting. A HUGE thank you to all of the AbbVie volunteers at the Gleason office for the extra hours putting together the special bags for our students, and to the AbbVie volunteers who worked in the hot sun at our school site. Our teachers will be thrilled with the bright staff lunchroom, and our students will have such fun with the new games. A final thank you to PPIE executive director Andrea Wilson; Donlon staff Adrienne Herz, Mark Smith, and Jeffrey Hall; PUSD executive director of operations Mehdi Rajabzadeh; and the Heart of America project coordinators for bringing this event to fruition!