Like any school, Glen Ridge High School holds many traditions that help to set it apart from other high schools in the nation. Among the most important traditions is the murals that each AP class paints after the students are done taking their exams. Given how important the murals are to Glen Ridge High School, it is worth examining the current policies.
The new AP mural policy is composed of four restrictions: each mural must be approved by a teacher; each mural must be near the classroom; each year, a new mural must be designated to paint over; and the most controversial, each mural must be limited to a space of three by five bricks. Before considering if these restrictions are a good idea, it is worth noting that there are more guidelines that are not enforced as harshly as rules that are set in stone.
“They aren’t restrictions so much as they are just guidelines,” comments Mr. Lawlor, principal of Glen Ridge High School. “We’re just trying to keep [the murals] fresh.”
The reason for the new guidelines is to allow the murals to be new and exciting, as stated by Mr. Lawlor. By allowing a number of older murals to be painted over, the school’s administration hopes to bring new life to a tradition that grows more boring with time. However, according to some, the guidelines that have been introduced actually limit the creativity that students are able to put into their art.
Grace Baur is a senior who has taken thirteen AP classes and collaborated on seven different murals. She states that it was much easier to create a good mural last year, before the new guidelines were introduced. “People didn’t have to limit their artistic decisions based on the amount of space. Of course, we had other limiting factors, like the time it would take, but now we have another limiting factor, which makes it even harder,” she claims.
Conversely, some argue that the allotted space should not limit the students’ creative freedom, and instead, can grant more to future AP students. “It really depends on the quality,” observes Mrs. Svetik, a middle school history teacher in Glen Ridge. “I think [the guidelines] are a way to make room for more murals, so as long as they space them out nicely, I think it’s okay to make them a little smaller.”
One issue with the decreased size of the murals is that it will take a long time for the hallways to be as densely packed with the artwork as they are today, detracting from the wonderful atmosphere that they currently create. Mrs. Svetik, commenting on this, states, “The murals really make our hallways colorful and inviting. I feel like if we had plain walls, it would be sterile and kind of cold.”
Mrs. Svetik also commented on the new initiative to paint over old murals every year. “I don’t necessarily think we need to paint over the old ones. There are some I would hate to see go, like the ‘Evolution of a Warrior’ one that featured Mr. Dimeck, but there are also some that I’ve had in the past that were bad, and I have literally requested to be painted over because they were so bad. I think we just have to pick and choose.”
There are some murals that have been created that should be painted over, but there are others of great quality that are simply not deserving of being eliminated due to their age. The new guideline stating that a mural must be painted over each year, unfortunately, which causes the better murals to suffer the same fate as the worse murals that deserve to be painted over. In addition, even the bad murals being painted over still cause the loss of the legacies of the students who painted them.
Dr. Gage, a music and band teacher at Glen Ridge High School, comments, “I value the way that the murals serve as a legacy for some of the stronger students that we’ve had in the school and that we often remember fondly. It is nice to be reminded of some of my students who I’ve had in my AP class, many of whom have gone on to very successful professional careers in music.”
Although the new guidelines regarding the painting of AP murals are meant to improve the murals, in reality, they cause the better murals from the past to be painted over, and create an unclear future for the murals that are still yet to be painted. Some of the guidelines are good ideas, such as the idea that murals must be kept near their subject’s classrooms, and the rule that a teacher must approve every mural before it is painted, but overall, they hinder the quality and potential of the AP students’ artwork.
