Our morning began with a surprise and it was not a happy one. I brought the students out to see what I saw when I walked to school this morning. A community mural has been further vandalized.

Seriously? More graffiti? This is beyond not okay. By 9:15 a.m. our class was standing outside on the sidewalk a block from our school looking at MORE graffiti on the beautiful mural at Out to Lunch Catering.

Last week we went to look at the graffiti and wrote about our feelings and sadness. (Read that post here) Imagine how upset we were to see more graffiti on the wall today. The mural is almost unrecognizable. Gracie expresses what many of us felt in her writing today:

Many kids were asking why someone would spray paint over art? Why wouldn’t they spray paint on a blank wall? Even though that would still be disrespectful . . . It was the graffiti on a mural that really hit us hard.

We came back to school and wrote. Kids were keen to express their feelings and outrage. The usual “how do you spell . . . ?”  requests were less. Everyone wanted to get their thoughts down. Violet shared: “They used spray paint again. Don’t draw over it. Because it was beautiful the way it was. I don’t like it.”

Kala was really angry and her writing shows it. She wrote this completely independently: “I don’t like it. That hurt my feelings. Please don’t do it again. How will you think if we did that to you? You are dumb. Why did I say that? Because it was mean.”

I heard from Out to Lunch that beginning today, there will be an attempt to clean up the graffiti. A solvent will be used to strip the spray paint from the mural. But there are no guarantees that the mural won’t be smudged. We are crossing all of our little fingers that it works and that nothing is damaged.

Those same fingers attached to the hands we were wringing today at the disrespectful few who decided it was okay to deface a beautiful community mural. To the graffiti “painters” our message is this (quoting from another student’s writing):  “You are so not cool.“