Moving Toward Greatness and Maximizing Potential: The Stephen Decatur School Murals
In January, the lead mural artist coordinated with the art teachers to explore this theme with all the students in the school through a series of drawing prompts. The students’ drawings featured themselves playing in a new magical playground and imagining their futures and moving towards greatness in all kinds of imaginative ways. The students also made lots of drawings of dolphins and animals that swim or fly along with imaginative garden imagery. These drawings provided a host of good ideas that were poured into the mural designs, as well as some great individual drawings that are featured as images in the murals. The lead artist spent two months working on pouring all this information and all the ideas and student drawings into the mural designs with the goal of carrying the theme throughout all the sections of the murals around the playground and school buildings.
The Decatur schoolyard was a large empty sheet of asphalt, which quickly changed with the addition of a turf field and some play structures. On the walls of the school building are new murals that provide a colorful backdrop to the play activities out in the yard and meaningful insight into what happens inside the walls of Decatur.
Description of the Mural Designs:
Because the architecture of the building contains all straight lines and right angles, the mural designs aim to soften the exterior boxiness with an overall motif of curved arcs throughout the background of the designs. This softening of the architecture is meant to make the young students feel welcomed and embraced as they play in the playground or enter the building. But the arcs also help to convey a sense of motion of the various figures and elements moving through the designs. This is reinforced in various sections with the use of curved arrows that help give this motion a sense of direction.
Main Entrance
The main entrance faces Academy Road and is surrounded by long stretches of brick. The murals cover about 70 feet of this plain brick on the left and right sides of the stairs and doors, which brightens up this part of the façade with color and welcoming imagery. The murals feature students’ drawings of themselves swimming and moving through water with fish and other sea life – becoming a “school of fish,” so to speak, moving towards the school entrance. The arcs in the background of this section represent both the motion of the figures, but also the flow of the water. The student drawings represent a variety of creative ways to move via water: it features students’ drawings of themselves riding a dolphin, a whale, a shark, and various other fish. It also features a swimmer, a snorkeler, a scuba diver, a surfer, and a boater. The boat features a flag that says “Decatur,” which is a nod to the naval history of the school’s namesake. To the left of the main entrance, under the existing metal letters that spell out the school’s name, the mural designs feature a crest with a leaping dolphin. Above the crest is a scroll that introduces the theme of “Moving Toward Greatness” and just below that, above the dolphin’s head is a graduation cap, which represents the goal of all the students and staff at Decatur to help one another learn and grow and progress to the next level. But it also is a reminder of how intelligent dolphins are and why they are such a great mascot for the school. Flanking the dolphin on the crest is a large set of wings, which represent how learning allows one to soar to unlimited heights.
Gym Wall (Academy Road Side)
The outer façade of the gym that faces Academy Road provides a large canvas for a design that highlights the “Maximizing Potential” part of the theme. It features a garden of flowers with pollinators (a bird and butterfly) hovering above, as an analogy of how schools are gardens of learning and growth. Students are like pollinators – picking up and disseminating new information as they move through their community. In the middle of the flower garden are three young students. They are diverse in age and gender and cultural background, but their hair collectively becomes a large mandala that is superimposed with a galaxy of swirling symbols of knowledge and learning. Mandalas are circular symmetrical patterns found in many cultures and represent one’s outward connection to everything else in the universe and at the same time one’s inner journey to their own deeper selves. The various learning symbols are as follows: a trumpet represents arts and music; a gear represents how each new idea is like a single interlocking piece in the larger machine of real knowledge; the chess piece represents importance of play, games, and strategy; the clock, the dinosaur fossil, and the computer chip represent measuring time and the past (the importance of history) and the future (the endless and ever changing possibilities of technology); the atom represents how essential even the smallest particles are; the globe and Saturn and stars representing how knowledge can take you anywhere in the world and beyond; and the key represents how learning is the key to attaining any dream.
Gym Wall (Parking Lot Side)
This wall is the sight of transition and movement – various community members arriving or leaving or dropping off or picking up children in this parking lot. The designs in the mural on this wall relay the journey of transformation that happens as young students progress through their time at Decatur. The flower garden and pollinators in the “Maximizing Potential” mural continues around to this wall – and in the center of the wall is another crest – this one with a scroll below that says “Transformation.” There is a butterfly on the crest and on the leafy fronds on either side of the crest are a caterpillar and a chrysalis, representing the stages of the life cycle of a butterfly. The Decatur students experience a similar transformation, entering as kindergarteners hungry to absorb new things like reading and math and other skills that allow them to depart as 8th grade graduates ready for the more advanced stages of high school and higher education and active and productive adult lives. The crest imagery is reinforced by a larger caterpillar on a flower to its left and a larger butterfly fluttering up the stairs (toward the playground) on the right. Students’ drawings of other flowers and pollinators contribute to the garden imagery on this wall.
Gym Wall (Playground Side) and IMC Walls
As one moves up the stairs from the parking lot, it ascends to the enormous school yard playground. Some of the murals around this playground feature the various sports programs offered at the school: softball, baseball, basketball, volleyball, track, soccer, and football. Each wall features a high-level athlete excelling in their sport paired with a student’s drawing of themselves aspiring to achieve higher levels of skill and competition in that sport, so that each vignette shows that ambition and hard work can lead to higher and higher levels of success. Each athlete has high-level sports organization logos on their shirts – like the NCAA, the WNBA, USA (Olympics), or World Cup.
The wall to the immediate left of the top of the stairs features an NCAA baseball player paired with a student’s drawing of herself playing softball. On the windowless flat wall of the IMC that faces the neighboring Fitzpatrick Recreation Center, the designs feature a WNBA player paired with a student’s drawing of himself playing basketball, and on the opposite windowless flat wall of the IMC there is an Olympic volleyball player also paired with a student drawing.
To the right of the Baseball player is a bike rack, and this section of the mural features a student’s drawing of herself on a bike, and on either side of the school entrance just beyond the bike rack the mural designs feature student drawings of a flower and butterfly, echoing the garden theme of the parking lot mural below and reminding students that they are entering a garden of learning as they pass through the door and into the school. Next to the flower drawing is a heart made from multicolored puzzle pieces – a symbol of autism. There is a missing piece, and the butterfly drawing is carrying the missing piece as it flies toward the flower and heart. This area of the playground is where the autistic students play during recess.
Playground Walls (K-5 Building)
There are two long stretches of walls under the bank of windows on the main K-5 building that border the main playground. The mural designs on these two stretches mainly feature children at play. The entrance to the school in the corner of the building where these two stretches meet are flanked by a glowing lotus-like flower blossom – to suggest that through those doors is a path to enlightenment and achieving greatness through learning. The children depicted in the murals are moving toward these door – via running, cartwheeling, sliding down a slide, swinging on a swing, climbing on monkeybars, and jumproping. Each area of movement/action features an illustration of a child in motion paired with students’ drawings of themselves in that same action. Brightly colored arrows help accentuate this moving towards enlightenment/greatness, and each figure has glints of highlights from the glow of the door blossom. There are also illustrations and student drawings of birds – representing the young students’ imagination and dreams taking flight. In the center of each long wall is a trio of football players – one side featuring quarterbacks throwing the ball, and the other side featuring receivers catching the ball. Each trio has a student’s drawing of his or herself dreaming of being a football player, with an illustration of a student actually playing football (building skills to attain the dream), and lastly of a professional football player at the highest level of success (attaining the dream). One of these student illustrations shows a disabled student in a wheelchair – a reminder that connecting through play is accessible to all.
The mural then wraps around the large, windowless end wall of the K-5 building. This stretch of wall features another trio of football players – this time running backs – moving toward the ultimate greatness in this particular endeavor – a championship – as denoted by a large eagle bird flying with the Super Bowl trophy in it’s talons. Surrounding the eagle is a quote that Eagles Coach Nick Sirianni said after winning the big game and which serves as a reminder to all of the importance of teamwork and collaboration in achieving any great accomplishment: “You can’t be great without the greatness of others.” Next to the eagle and trophy imagery is a track hurdler and a student drawing of a hurdler, which reiterates the moving toward greatness theme and represents another after school sport that Decatur offers to its students.
7th and 8th Grade Building Walls
The last set of murals that face the playground run along the brick walls of 7th and 8th Grade Building. The designs in this section feature a series of four crests that emphasize some of the key elements in the daily pledge that Decatur students recite each day. One is about being RESPONSIBLE – and features a chipmunk collecting acorns (saving for the future) and a hand holding a seedling (stewarding the environment for future generations). The second is about the importance of diversity and being RESPECTFUL to others, and features a group of five diverse hands interlocked to form a circle. It also features two different species of birds sharing berries from the same bush. The third crest is about the importance of CARING for each other. It features a hand grasping another hand to help pull it upward and also features a mama bird feeding her baby. The forth crest is located centrally in the design and extols the values of HARD WORK to achieve success. It features a bee (symbol of industriousness) along with a hand holding a wrench in front of a large gear. On either side of the Hard Work crest is a kicker. One is a professional football player and the other is a school aged youth. The arcs of the kicks show ambitions taking flight with various students’ drawings of themselves flying toward their dreams moving towards a target/goal that they are aiming for. The arc of the boy’s kick transforms into an airplane, and the arc of the professional’s kick transforms into a rocket – showing the limitlessness of what one can aspire to. One particularly great student drawing in this section features a girl flying with a large book serving as her wings.
The large windowless wall that directly faces the stairway entrance to the yard from the parking lot has another marquee theme mural focused on “Moving Toward Greatness.” This time the imagery is more focused on the older students as they prepare to leave Decaur for the next stage of their learning journeys. The design features a large compass and lighthouse above the entrance door on this wall – reminding students that the education received inside these walls will help provide direction for their future aspirations. It is also another nod to the naval history of the school’s namesake. Emanating from either side of the door is a large wave-like leaf form. A boy student and girl student are running towards their dreams – as represented by all the bubbles rising from the waves that each contain students’ drawings of what they want to be when they grow up. These drawings show various professions in the fields of arts and sciences and technology: a doctor, a chef, a teacher, a football player, and artist, a fashion designer, a dancer, a pilot, a you tuber, an actor, a realtor, a scientist, and a veterinarian. The running girl has arms outstretched and there is a large eagle with outstretched wingspan soaring above her. Likewise there is a large dolphin leaping out of the wave above the running boy. Student drawings of themselves riding on the back of an eagle and dolphin are juxtaposed above the waves as well.
To the right of this marquee mural, the last section of mural runs down the wall of this building that faces the Fitzpatrick Rec Center. This mural section will feature student drawings of running, skateboarding and driving in a car – all moving toward the “Moving Toward Greatness” mural. It also features a dynamic soccer player and student drawing of a soccer player in mid kick, which is another after-school sports program at Decatur.
The hope is that through the mural designs, the external environment of the school will be transformed to make a more positive and welcoming daily experience for the staff and students, as well as the surrounding neighborhood – inspiring all who use the space to help them move toward greatness and to help each other to learn and grow so they can maximize their own potential and reach their goals.
The project is sponsored by The Philadelphia Eagles.
Since 1999, the Philadelphia Eagles (as the Philadelphia Eagles Youth Partnership from 1999-2015) has funded an annual Playground Build that includes the entire Philadelphia Eagles organization, including players, coaches, and staff members, with a Philadelphia school community to transform asphalt school yards into beautiful, imaginative and safe spaces for play and recreation. Mural Arts Philadelphia joined this partnership between the Eagles and the School District of Philadelphia in 2002. Mural Arts leads the development and production of the murals and mosaic tables that are part of these projects. Once a school is selected, Mural Arts leads an introductory pep rally at the school, as well as drawing workshops and after-school art programs with students to involve the school community in developing a theme for the project. Murals are then designed around the theme, often incorporating student drawings and artwork. The projects also include installations of play structures and a mini Eagles turf field in addition to the colorful murals and mosaic tables.
