The new principal at Holabird Elementary, a squat Southeast Baltimore building wedged between a graveyard and the projects, called it the “forgotten school.”
But Lindsay Krey, who took the helm of the O?Donnell Heights school this year to refocus it as a college preparatory, wanted to show students and parents that a turnaround was blossoming behind the clouded windows and prisonlike doors.
“I wanted to start the school year off with a bang and show that something new and different was happening here,” she said.
Her search ended when she drove past Baltimore Truck Wash and spotted artist Kevin Walsh painting pickups on a wall.
Six weeks and hundreds of hours painting later, Walsh, who never worked with children before, is finishing up a mural in the cafeteria that has captured the imaginations of the students, parents, teachers and custodians — everyone who has visited the school this year.
From the milkman to the school nurse, everyone linked to the school is represented in the massive painting, a colorful tapestry of symbols representing the people trying to open students? eyes to not only the possibility of a high school diploma, but a college degree.
Krey, whose name means crow in German, appears as black bird in the mural, wearing a crown and sitting atop a fence, watching the children as they make their way to a castle symbolizing college.
Smock-clad children holding large brushes fill in the yellow petals of sunflowers and the green blades of grass on a recent afternoon as Walsh, wearing a wildly psychedelic fleece sweat shirt and paint-splattered pants, instructs them on technique.
“It?s beautiful to have these kids exposed to art and taking part. Some say they even want to be artists now,” said Walsh, 45, who has spent $600 on gas making the daily trek from his Eldersburg home to Baltimore since November.
“This is my Christmas present to them. I gave everything I had for this mural. It?s a time capsule for the school for this one particular period of time.”
Students have raised $800 in lollipops and candy canes to pay for the painting, but Walsh concedes to buying a lot of the Blowpops.
Visitors to this neighborhood won?t see new toys in the lawns. Some of the children are homeless or have sick parents. Many students couldn?t even name a college at the beginning of the school year. But now all have been groomed to rattle off their expected college graduation dates when asked.
“2020,” said fourth-grader Kameron Tsakalos, without hesitation, as he painted a sunflower.
Walsh was so moved by the whole experience of working with students, he?s kept a journal.
“I feel like this dream will be ending soon and I will wake up and return to my life as an outsider living on the fringes of society once again,” he wrote.
“Many of the jobs I?ve had over the past 15 years have been about getting the job done and getting out.”
But these days, Walsh finds himself working a little slower and talking with the children and teachers a little longer, wary of the day the mural will finally be finished. He paints “tattoos” of butterflies on the arms of eager children. One time, a troubled boy just needed someone to talk to so Walsh walked with him until he calmed down. Walsh said he has tried to become a positive male role model for a school where sometimes only one or two fathers or grandfathers show up on parent-teacher nights.
“I don?t think he knows what kind of impact he?s had on the students. He?s been a mentor,” Krey said.
The children and teachers also have left a lasting impression on Walsh.
His journal entries continue for dozens of single-spaced pages, as he ponders the draining feeling teachers must endure daily and how the children at Holabird are ravenous for attention.
“These children, growing up without new bicycles, computers, digital games, fancy clothes, movies, VCRs, dinners at McDonald?s, they hold on dearly to those wonderful things that pop up on the cracked sidewalks and streets of this dirty little neighborhood,” he wrote.
“I just happened to be one of those little things and don?t think I won?t be forever grateful they stopped to pick me up either.”
More teachers and children request symbols for the playful mural every day. Theater masks represent the drama instructor, a guitar for the janitor, a dog eating its way out of a strawberry for a canine- and fruit-loving teacher.
Walsh believes the painting has become just as much the students? creation as his own. And, just as the children brought life to a drab wall, they too have reinvigorated the muralist.
Walsh knows exactly which symbol he?ll paint to represent himself.
“A snowman,” he said, “because it?s built by children?s hands.”
