In a community as geographically diverse as Butler Area School District, there is no single path that young people take towards success. Some students grow up in the urban heart of this small city just north of Pittsburgh, while others are raised on the farmlands that surround it. Nearly one-third of Butler’s high schoolers have already begun vocational training for trade careers, while many others look toward college as they map their futures.
These young people are also approaching adulthood at a moment in history when technology is shifting career paths more quickly than ever. Some of Butler’s elementary schoolers will one day work at jobs that haven’t been imagined yet.
Given all of this change and possibility, how does a community inspire and empower its children to build thriving, successful lives?
In Butler, that complex question is being tackled through an innovative web of arts-focused initiatives that are transforming the physical landscape and boosting civic pride while helping students build a range of skills and strengths.
This multi-tentacled project, titled “Welcome to Butler’s Neighborhood,” was conceived and launched with funding from a Remake Learning Moonshot Grant. It is spearheaded by Butler Area School District, but school leaders are partnering closely with a range of community stakeholders, including the city government and local nonprofits.
The Butler region has always been a place rich in history and culture, “but it has never been developed in this way,” says Leslie Osche, chair of the Butler County Board of Commissioners. And never before with students at the forefront.
ART AND SCIENCE MEET CIVIC PLANNING
Many of the arts projects included in “Welcome to Butler’s Neighborhood” are deliberately hands-on and low-tech. Each has been designed to teach multiple skills.
The team of seventh- and eighth-graders creating the city’s new Youth Arts Alley will be hand-painting murals on the ground, crafting an outdoor display of stained glass art and even turning the ground beneath a row of parking meters into a garden designed to attract butterflies.
Given the alley’s location in the city’s center, directly in front of the public library, “this is turning into a project that’s not only educational, but it’s also community service,” says Carrie Morgan-Davis, principal of McQuistion Elementary School. “It’s going to end up being a civics event, because we need to make sure our final project is OK with the city.”
Most of these students, invited to participate by their art and computer science teachers, didn’t know one another when their work began. This semester, they have begun meeting during their daily activity period, developing their planning, collaboration and project management skills in the process,
Also Butler is among the cities on the monarch butterfly migration path. So students in multiple grades will be able to use the garden for hands-on learning about science concepts related to butterflies and other migrating insects.
History learning, too, plays a prominent role in the Youth Arts Alley, Morgan-Davis says: The students plan to incorporate local history, including Butler’s role as the birthplace of the Jeep and the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, into their mural and stained glass creations.
Other groups of students are collaborating with artist-in-residence Tom Panei and local organizations to build a trail of public benches that celebrate local history and civic pride while creating comfortable spaces for residents to gather. One, designed in the shape of an open book, is already in place near the Arts Alley at Emily Brittain Elementary School.
Another, planned for the nearby Broad Street Elementary School, will honor the first Black member of the National Guard. Meanwhile, inside the high school, an area that once housed a bank of lockers has been transformed by a team of students and teachers into a cozy gathering place.
In ways big and small, the school district is rethinking space to foster community cohesiveness while offering students creative opportunities and a chance to shine.
LARGER THAN LIFE CREATIONS
Among the many projects that are merging student learning with community pride in Butler, the most high-tech is the use of large-scale projection mapping.
Imagine an enormous video of the district’s whirling mascot, Tuffy Tornado, looming large in front of a wild thunderstorm as Butler’s fight song plays. High school senior Eli Snyder had never used projection mapping technology before this school year began. But after just a few weeks of experimenting, he was able to design a video of Tuffy that can fill the entire side of a building as people arrive at high school football games.
Snyder’s face lights up when he talks about using HeavyM mapping software and the school’s new high-tech projectors. The software measures all the surfaces on the facade of a building, then customizes any images or video to the exact shape of the building. So you can watch images on the surface of any building as though it were a flat screen.
“We can use it for things such as sports and school spirit, and so many different applications that this could have,” says Snyder, who is working on this with a team of five other high schoolers.
These students are learning technology and art skills, while collaborating with each other and looking to help local businesses and arts organizations promote their work. In the process, some are discovering potential career paths they had never considered.
The creative possibilities are endless: Projecting images of local history on the facades of downtown buildings. Showing wall-sized images from past wrestling matches in the days ahead of a school wrestling tournament. Getting people excited about an upcoming school play by projecting images of an enormous theater curtain on the side of a school building.
“Our minds are just going and the students are constantly talking about things we could do or what we could try,” says Erik Robbins, who teaches TV production and journalism at the high school, and recruited several students for the team.
On November 30th, the projection mapping team will project images of students and teachers wearing Butler Area gear appearing to wave from the windows of local buildings during the city’s holiday parade, along with other holiday imagery and perhaps some homages to local history, too.
Though the parade will be this fledgling project’s first full-scale demonstration, it is already highlighting many threads of this multi-pronged project: Student learning, creative expression, community pride and a powerful sense that everyone is welcome and invited to thrive in Butler’s Neighborhood.
Authored by
Melissa Rayworth
Melissa Rayworth has spent two decades writing about the building blocks of modern life — how we design our homes, raise our children and care for elderly family members, how we interact with pop culture in our marketing-saturated society, and how our culture tackles (and avoids) issues of social justice and the environment.