Combine one art teacher, 16 students and a professional muralist and you get the voices of 18 people combined and put on a wall.

            February 9- 22 those 18 people put what they felt, saw and thought on a wall in one huge picture that tries to ‘reflect the community it is in.’ Art teacher Laurie McLane-Higginson had the idea to add some life into the Commons, so she took the idea to Principal Ed West, who agreed that the barren walls could use a ‘breath of life.’

            Professional muralist Dave Loewenstien was hired and students applied to work on the mural. The students where picked based on three qualities: why they wanted to do the mural, their art experiences and how the committed they could be to the project.

            The artists brainstormed the ideas for what to paint. Loewenstien asked students: “why are you in the school?” From there they came up with ideas of what would make it onto the mural.

            “You look at it and you see what you see,” McLane-Higginson said.  “The mural is about identity; bring people together, and walking in another’s shoes. In other words, the mural is all those things plus what you make of it.”

          Each student had their own interpretation of the mural.

“There are different layers to everything, kind of like an onion,” senior Judy Oh said, whose favorite part of doing the mural was just getting to paint it. “The outside is the superficial part and then you unzip it and there’s something deeper.”

            The most important part of working on the mural for senior Darian Kimball was bringing people together. He sacrificed two weeks of work to make the commitment to this project. Students worked three hours everyday after school and five hours on the weekend.

           Everyone on the team had to come up with the answer to the same question: “why are we here?”

            The muralist chose the answers to that question as their picture- their project. The mural went up exactly on schedule in two weeks time, and the 16 students, one art teacher and the professional muralist added their color to the drab walls of the Commons.

The mural was finished on February 22 and was dedicated on February 25.  

The following list is the names of the students who painted the mural: Charika Billie, Kelly Chadwick, Iris Cliff, Jack Hearnen, Mark Jongmen-Soreno, Darian Kimball, Jessica Long-Heineke, Sofie Matzen, Taylor Mitchell, Kajsa Mullinex, Judy Oh, Eileen Richling, Ashley Russell, Amy Stahl, Alex Swanson, Sam Willger