The hallways of Chabot Center on Stoneridge Drive echoed with youthful voices and footsteps last month when 30 fourth and fifth grade students from Valley View Elementary School visited Hacienda Business Park. It was the first in a series of scheduled field trips to the park for Pleasanton school children.

Field trips have been cancelled in Pleasanton schools due to a shortage of funds. Tours of places such as Hacienda Business Park are one way for local businesses to augment school budgets.

Accompanied by their teacher, Donn Inglesby, and several mothers who volunteered as chauffeurs, the students learned some facts and figures about the park and viewed the Hacienda Business Park multi-image slide show. Afterward, they toured Chabot Center, where they saw open office space under construction and learned how it is partitioned into smaller offices. They also visited offices where the park's first occupants were actually working.

Tour guides for the trip were Donna Fernandez, coordinator of Hacienda's community room, and Patti Le Vine, Director of Communications for Hacienda Business Park. One of the high points of the tour came when the students visited the offices of Pleasanton Pathways, where they watched editor Lilly Ault, and layout artist Carol O'Neal putting the finishing touches on the November edition of the paper.

The students were an eager audience, and learned many interesting facts about the business park; such as:

• Over 20 miles of bike and pedestrian paths will wander through the park.

• Over 7,000 trees and 70,000 shrubs will be planted in the common areas of the park including, Red Oak, Canary Island Pine, Flowering Plum, Lombardy Poplar and Red Ironbark Eucalyptus.

• The banks of the streams and canals which run through the park will be landscaped with native plants which will encourage birds, insects and small animals to live there.

• The Hacienda arch is 34 feet high, weighs 100,000 lbs and its foundations are sunk 30 feet into the ground.

• The purple bricks in the pedestrian crosswalks serve to alert drivers to foot traffic and provide a safety feature as well as contributing to the overall award-winning design of the park.

Several days after the field trip, thank you letters and drawings were received from the Valley View students. Some are reprinted here, and all will be on display in the lobby of the Hacienda Community Room.

To see a reproduction of the original article and edition of Pleasanton Pathways, visit: January 1, 1984 Pathways.