Sonja Cayetano, an eighth-grader at Pacific Beach Middle, had her family and 13 volunteers help her complete her school community project on April 23. The group spent their Saturday morning painting murals on walls around the school’s athletic fields to signify the values of the International Baccalaureate school, which are trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship.
Cayetano interviewed students about their poor behavior out on the fields during the lunch. She saw kids being verbally and physically abusive to one another.
“The school’s values and principals were already painted on the wall for us to follow. They are examples of how we really should behave and yet we weren’t following them. So I wanted to create these symbols to show students visually what those principles actually mean,” Cayetano explains.
Cayetano thinks that a lot of students don’t really recognize what the school values mean. Because of her, they now will be more visually prompted by something that is aesthetically pleasing. Last year, she designed murals advocating students to be safer while coming to school. She says it had a really profound effect on a community and she felt that art would really have a great effect on a school community.
“I really would like to do more art projects like this, because I enjoy creating art. I’m going to have to see how this is going the affect the community and I would like to hear student and teacher feedback,” she says.
Her mother, Julie Cayetano, says that Sonja put a lot of heart and soul into the project. “It’s meaningful for her, and I think it’s great because it’s going be here for a really long time. Maybe another child along the way will make it their eighth grade project to continue to keep them up and repaint them as they need it,” Julie said.
Sonja says she wanted to create something that is permanent and would inspire other students to do the same.