Justice LUG, Assemble!

The morning after returning from Thanksgiving break, Concordia Elementary School principal Rob McKane was distressed to find that vandals had broken into the San Clemente, California school’s library and smashed over 100 LEGO® Star Wars™ models.

The collection was the heart and soul of Concordia.   The assembled LEGO sets were donated by art teacher Jeanna Bassett over many years.  Mrs. Bassett attended this school as a student on the day it opened in 1955, and returned as a teacher here over 30 years ago.  But even more amazing is that she is the ultimate Star Wars fan and recalls seeing the movie on opening day in 1977.  She has a shrine of memorabilia that she loves to show everyone, fortunately locked up safely and not affected by the library break in.

Word of the damage spread and based on the power of social media, quickly came to the attention of AFOLs in Southern California.  We reached out to principal McKane and offered our help.  Because of the extent of the disassembly, it wasn’t really feasible to have the students do the rebuilding.  It needed AFOL help – and lots of it!   Fortunately, due to the Winter break at the school we had a couple of weeks to work.   We put out the word, and the response was amazing.   We had volunteers from OCLUG, LUGOLA, SanDLUG, TIELUG, LBLUG, and the 501^st Legion.  The “Justice LUG” was born as heroes assembled to right the wrong at Concordia.

When we arrived on the first day, we set out on two tasks.   First was to try to identify the “chunks” of sets that could be matched up to expedite the rebuilding.   The second task was to de-brick and sort everything else so that the builders could quickly find pieces that they needed.

From there, the hard work began.  Each AFOL took a model as a project and started working to rebuild.   Mrs. Bassett had kept many of her paper instruction books which helped, but we were able to use some tablets to access the digital instructions archives on Lego.com for the rest.

It was actually slower to rebuild a model using the “chunks” because it wasn’t always clear what parts were missing from before or after the steps where the section was built.  In hindsight, it would have been faster to fully disassemble everything, sort the parts, and start building from step 1.

In all, we spent 3 full days at Concordia with between 25 and 35 AFOLs participating each day.  The majority of the models were completed, but there were some extra parts left over so we might have missed a couple small models!   It was challenging not having a detail inventory to work from.

On Friday, January 11^th principal McKane organized a special event to reveal the results.  Students had returned from break and he wanted to use this as a teaching lesson for them.  The outpouring of help from the community was amazing.  Many people had donated LEGO Star Wars sets to Mrs. Bassett’s collection, including the Orange County Goodwill which donated a fully built 75192 Millennium Falcon!  I reached out to Jordan Paxton on the Community Team and explained the story.  As a special token from the LEGO Group, Jordan helped us secure a Black VIP card for Mrs. Bassett as a Star Wars super fan (and owner of a Falcon).

Several members of the 501^st Legion brought full Star Wars costumes.  We all paraded the rebuilt models out onto the stage in front of the students to rousing cheers.  Principal McKane’s message to the students was “No matter how bad your day starts, there is always someone that cares about you.” 

This was by far the most rewarding LUG experience since I’ve been a member.  I’m grateful to The LEGO Group Community Team for enabling us as brand Ambassadors to extend the reach of the company, and to be able to engage local communities in need.  It was an honor to be able to help Concordia Elementary.  Leg godt! 

Related news articles:

• https://www.facebook.com/pg/MrsBassettsMasterBuilders/posts/

• https://www.ocregister.com/2018/12/12/teacher-mourns-loss-of-30-year-old-lego-collection-smashed-by-vandals-at-san-clemente-elementary-school/

• http://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/entertainment/tn-wknd-et-lego-20181221-story.html

• http://www.sanclementetimes.com/volunteers-legoland-step-replace-teachers-collection/

• https://www.ocregister.com/2018/12/20/san-clemente-teacher-to-be-surprised-with-millennium-falcon-after-her-30-year-old-lego-sets-are-destroyed/

• https://patch.com/california/sanclemente/lego-star-wars-collection-smashed-vandals-community-rallies

• http://newsroom.ocde.us/in-the-news-parents-community-help-pick-up-the-pieces-after-vandals-smash-lego-displays/

• https://www.facebook.com/pg/MrsBassettsMasterBuilders/posts/