The grand unveiling and dedication of the Meany Middle School Book Wall takes place at 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, March 10, in the school's main hall with all the music, fun and folderol you would expect from a five-month project involving 250 students and 50 adult volunteers.
The public is invited.
That is, if repairs go well. Workers hanging the mural last weekend included volunteer parents who pounded with hammers and shook things loose. Crashing sounds and muttered apologies were the sounds of the day, but Princess Shareef, the school principal, and Chris Cocklin-Ray, the artist in residence who oversaw the project, beamed. Cocklin-Ray encouraged them, saying that the repairs would be easy.
The book wall is a brightly glazed, clay tile mosaic that forms a colorful mural 4 feet high and 30 feet long in the main hall on the outside wall of the gym. It memorializes 10 books the students have read in classes and captures the feel of the books.
Nine classes worked on the mural. They were each split into three groups and each group did a 1- by 4-foot tile mosaic panel that included the book's inspiration, details of the story and one event in the book. Classes included language arts, science, leadership, the sixth grade and a developmentally disabled class, and each class chose a different book.
Originally the plan called for 19 panels in the mural, but as classes began working last October interest spread and more teachers wanted to involve their classes. The final mural has 27 panels, plus a dedication panel that students put together during their lunch hours.
"This year we lost our art teacher because we lost our funding," said Tracy Krauter, who has one child in the school and served as volunteer coordinator for the project. "This is a way to bring art into the school. The most important thing is that it gives those kids who are visual a chance to shine. It was fascinating that within the group sometimes a quiet or "tough" kid would take on a leadership role and have the biggest idea that he or she would direct the others in making. Everyone played a part and the books came alive in the clay."
This project was funded by a block grant through the City of Seattle. One of the conditions was involving volunteer hours on the project. Meany Middle School is next to the Miller Community Center at 19th Avenue East and East John, and the project attracted 400 hours of volunteer help from parents and the community center.
Each class was split into three teams, each of which produced a tile mosaic panel one foot wide and four feet long. The teams were formed to include boys and girls and representatives of several ethnic groups. The students were not allowed to form teams based on their own, familiar and comfortable social groups.
"I made it so each kid had a hand in it," Cocklin Ray said. "Nobody sat by the sidelines."
The project had tremendous individual buy-in by the students, who worked hard and enjoyed it. The clay was formed and glazed in the art room and then fired in two aging kilns in the school.
"It's very heavy in labor, but light in materials," Cocklin Ray said. "It is not an expensive project."
"As I worked on the book wall I felt challenged and excited at the same time," wrote a seventh- grade participant. "I also felt that I couldn't do good art. Then, as I started doing it, I felt more and more confident about my artwork. I loved working on the book wall. It helped me bond with people I never really got to know before. That was really an intense experience for me. I learned to trust them with the artwork and also with getting it done. Doing the book wall taught me a lot. One thing it taught me was to trust people."
The mosaic is high on the wall, out of reach of most of the students. Damage, based on the comments during installation, should be relatively easy to repair.
What are the best things about the project?
"There are a lot of best things," responded Principal Shareef. Some of those things included having student art in the building, a solid connection between the school's literacy focus and art, and the feeling of accomplishment the completed mural has instilled in the students.
Of the 450 students at Meany Middle School more than half worked on this project.
"I found it an absolutely delightful place to work," Cocklin-Ray said. "The kids are wonderful and the teachers are great. The principal has been extremely supportive."
"We want some good press for a school that some people see as scary or ailing," Krauter said. It's not."
Cocklin-Ray, who has done 25 art projects in Washington schools over the past several years, including Mercer Island, Kirkland and Bellevue, supported Krauter.
"These are the happiest kids I have worked with," she said.
Books represented on the book wall are: "Stuck in Neutral," by Terry Truman; "Thunder Cave," by Roland Smith; "Tears of a Tiger," by Sharon Draper; "A series of Unfortunate Evens," by Lemony Snicket; "Tupac Resurrection," by Tupac Shakur; "A Child Called IT," by David J. Peltzer; "Fever 1793," by L.H. Anderson; "Charlie's Story," by Maeve Friel; "Holes," by Louis Sachar; and "Jackie Robinson's Nine Values to Live By," by Sharon Robinson.
Freelance writer Korte Brueckmann lives on Capitol Hill and can be reached at editor@capitol hilltimes.com.
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