Program helps make residences more like home

Paul Iverson/Caller-Times

The $130,000 ‘Make This House a Home Dorm Improvement’ project is the brainchild of the Volunteer Services Council of the Corpus Christi State School.

Joe Hardeman works hard at making his dorm room at the Corpus Christi State School feel like home. The 27-year-old resident of the facility's Pompano Home does grounds work at the school and provides janitorial services at the Regional Transportation Authority. The two jobs pay him enough money for such creature comforts as a DVD player and surround-sound system.
   In his spare time, Hardeman creates ink drawings that he displays on his walls.
   When fellow residents learned that the school had undertaken a project to make its 15 residential dorms and 15 common living areas less institutional, a group pitched in its ideas, hoping to see what Hardeman had incorporated in his own living quarters go campuswide.
   And it has.
   'We made it a reality'
   "These guys dreamed, and we made it a reality," said Cheryl Durham, an assistant director at one of the school's units, referring to the wish list requests residents made, including new curtains, rugs and a different coat of paint on the walls.
   The $130,000 "Make This House a Home Dorm Improvement" project is the brainchild of the Volunteer Services Council of the Corpus Christi State School. It began last summer after the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation spent $650,000 to replace the school's window panes and frames.
   That prompted the council to go after grant money that would enable the school to make the dorms more homelike for its 387 residents, said Mary Y. Daniel, the school's director of community relations, who helped write the grant application.
   To date, area foundations have awarded the council a total of $90,000 to replace curtains, blinds and worn furniture, buy home décor items and outfit campus patios. The school hopes to raise the remaining $40,000 by December, Daniel said.
   "Our residents have become very enthusiastic," Daniel said. "This project is involving them as much as they can become involved, and of course that raises their self-esteem, increases their positive behavior, reduces their agitation and increases their attention span."
   Less 'mix-and-match'

How to help To donate to the Make This House a Home Dorm Improvement project, call the Volunteer Services Council of the Corpus Christi State School at 844-7719.

   At Hardeman's dorm, futon chairs and a patio swing already have arrived. And as soon as they did, his fellow residents eagerly commandeered the task of assembly.
   "Everything here is starting to look less mix-and-match and more coordinated," Hardeman said. "I like it very much, and I know the guys like it very much, too. The futon chairs are so comfortable, not like the chairs we used to have."
   John O'Reilly, clinical psychologist at Pompano, was there at the height of excitement when the futon chairs arrived.
   "Just seeing them work together at something different was so neat," O'Reilly said.
   "It was a real bonding moment for them," said O.B. Gonzalez, services coordinator at Pompano. "And I can already see they've taken ownership. I hear them telling each other to take their feet off the chairs and not mess with the things they've helped assemble."