Eight-year-old Kayla Kim smiled as she rolled paint onto the wall of the Kawananakoa Middle School’s cafeteria near the Pali Highway during a community cleanup organized by employees of First Hawaiian Bank.

"I just like painting," said the Mililani ‘Ike Elementary School second-grader. "I also like to hang out with my family, and I like having fun."

She was among 250 volunteers sprucing up three schools on Oahu on Saturday to help the state Department of Education tackle a backlog of building repairs. The three-school event was the second project under First Hawaiian Bank’s Community Care volunteer service program.

"It’s just something that we do," said Gary Caulfield, First Hawaiian Bank’s vice chairman and chief information officer. "We believe in relationships. We live in the community and we’re a part of it and we want to contribute back."

The two other schools smartened up were Waialua High and Intermediate and Manoa Elementary. At Kawananakoa, more than 125 volunteers painted eight buildings, the cafeteria, a wall surrounding a park behind the school, and the yellow sidewalk curbs.

"When the kids come back to school on Monday, they will have something to look at," Gerald Schraepfer, a quality control employee at Jade Painting, told the volunteers before doling out their assignments. "Put some pride in the school, and they’ll take pride back."

Schraepfer, who was volunteering with other employees from the painting company, estimated the job at Kawananakoa would cost more than $100,000 under a professional contract and take about a month for a four-man crew working 40 hours a week to complete.

"It looks like the building was all painted," he said, pointing out the contrast with the white wall and the brown wainscoting volunteers had just repainted. "It cleaned up the view."

First Hawaiian Bank employees worked with Hawaii 3R’s, a nonprofit started by the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Ino­uye, and the Department of Education to select three schools where projects could be done quickly and have a large impact, said Dev Braganza, a board member for Hawaii 3R’s, which stands for repair, remodel and restore Hawaii’s public schools.

Ray L’Heureux, another Hawaii 3R’s board member, said the nonprofit’s goal is to reduce the DOE’s repair backlog and has helped shrink it — along with help from the state Legislature — from $640 million when the organization started in 2001 to about $250 million today.

What the volunteers did in one day would have taken the DOE months to complete because contracts and lawyers would have gotten in the way, said L’Heureux, who is also the deputy superintendent in charge of school facilities for the DOE.

Kayla, the second-grader from Mililani, initially didn’t want to attend the event with her father, John Kim, a database administrator at First Hawaiian Bank, and her mother, Ivonne Kim, but soon changed her mind.

"I think (the students will) like how the school was repainted," she said. "I like it."