Alternative actions could have saved school tradition

Alternative+actions+could+have+saved+school+tradition

By the start of the next school year senior murals are planned to be taken down permanently, a choice which has caused student upset.

While the idea of having to find room to make a new mural every year is one that raises concern, this should not be a big enough concern to kill the tradition.

Even if the murals had to take a sacrifice in their size, this would be better than eliminating them all together. This seems like something that students eager to make a mural would agree with.

If room can be made for several large televisions to be hung up around the first floor of the building that appear to do nothing more than show the announcements that every student has access to on their Chromebooks, it would certainly seem like room could be made for a student made piece of artwork.

For example, murals could be present on the walls of the school’s entrances or in the staircases, each of which have blank walls large enough for a canvas and some paint.

The initial reason for having to remove the murals came from the plan to remodel the science wing on the second floor, the home to most of the murals.

While the first mural is being moved to social studies teacher Candace Fikis’ classroom, a decision was made that taking down and rehanging every single mural was more trouble than it was worth.

We do understand that preserving all of the old murals would be costly, time consuming, and not completely necessary. But just because preserving the old is not an option, this does not mean that the tradition cannot and should not live on.

One concern with getting rid of the old murals but still allowing new ones to be made is that it would not be fair to those whose murals are being taken down. That they would come back into the school and instead of seeing the mural they made several years ago, they would see only new murals with no trace of the ones from the past.

While this concern is understandable, it still does not seem like this should be a reason to erase the murals from school history all together.

Either way the old murals are coming down, so does it make more sense to kill the tradition and be fair to those who have already graduated by letting no one else from here on have the experience that they did, or does it make more sense to start over and preserve the tradition of being able to leave your mark as a senior in the form of art?

To us, the answer to this question is obvious.

The situation with the murals is comparable to that of the All-Conference pictures.

For those who are not aware, a year ago the pictures of all of the athletes who have received All-Conference recognition or other similar recognitions and awards filled the halls surrounding Bishop gym.

Today however, those walls are bare. That is because the old pictures were taken down to make space for a new format.

The idea is that recent pictures of players who have received special honors will be hung up in new frames, while the old pictures will be advertised digitally in some way. After a certain amount of years the pictures will be replaced with new ones, and the ones that were taken down will then be added in the digital database.

If a similar school tradition can be kept alive with a few modifications that are the products of brainstormed ideas, we do not understand why the same cannot be done with the school made murals.

All-Conference pictures adapting a sort of ‘out with the old, in with the new’ cycle proves that something similar can be done with the murals. In the end, it would basically be the exact same concept.

If taking down the murals permanently is the only way to make room for construction, then it is the only way and that’s that. But it doesn’t seem like it is the only way, and that is why we are upset. All we wish for is that the topic was handled in a way that showed just a little more effort to keep a valued school tradition alive.