Over the summer a fresh coat of white paint was added to the grey tinged school hallways. While this pristine new coat has added to the school beautification initiative, a piece of the school’s essence has been covered as well. Along with the stray pencil marks and shoe scuffs, the paint job covered several key pieces of artwork that defined the students spirit through generations of classes.Stunned students returned from their summer vacations to find familiar walls once bursting with color as nothing more than blank stretches of white cinderblock.

English teacher, David Quirin’s, famous handprint classroom in particular was one of the most noticed changes to occur. Before, his classroom wall had been peppered with the handprints of his former students from the past five years, but this year it remains eerily blank. Students from Quirin’’s class last year, who had only just recently added their hand print to the wall, were in particularly disappointed by this change. Among them was senior Wylie Wang, who had seen the classroom being painted over during the summer.“I was flabbergasted,” he said as he recalled the day, “I had just put my hand print there the year before.”

Despite the fact that Quirin had given his consent when the administrations asked about repainting the wall, he was just as sad to see the mob of handprints that had previously characterized his classroom go. In fact, the only reason that he agreed to have the handprints erased when the administration had made the request was because he was unsure as to whether or not the room would be his primary classroom anymore since he is no longer in charge of SCA. Despite being disappointed by the change, he chose to look on the bright side saying that, “There comes a time for change. It stinks that four to five years of hand prints were removed but at the same point in time I told people it now gives us the ability to do other things with the room that we could not have done before.” While Quirin does not plan on continuing the handprint tradition, he is planning on letting his students this year decide how they want to leave their mark using the space on the wall.

Along with Quirin’s classroom, the inprogress periodic table located in the science hallway was painted over as well. Before being covered up, art club members had spent approximately twenty hours in total drawing out the lines of the periodic table and planning the layout. It was expected to be finished later this year, but when the project’s member numbers dwindled down, leaving Nicole Thomas in charge of the mural, as the lone member still involved, she had ultimately decided to scrap the mural. Given her senior course load of AP work she felt that finishing it alone would be nearly impossible and so when the art club’s advisor, Mrs. Deborah Cooper, had asked whether or not Thomas wanted a sign placed over it warning the painters to avoid it as had been done for the other murals, she had said no. “Honestly I think it was better that it got covered up,” Thomas  said, “I would love to still work on it but I don’t think it would have gotten finished and I think, in the end, it was better that it was covered up.”

While the periodic table had been the only mural left without a sign warning painters away, a total of two murals were painted over during the summer, the second one being the koi fish mural at the end of the arts hallway. This mural was not supposed to be painted over, yet when the school year started again the stretch of the wall was blank. While art club members are not sure why it was painted over, Deborah Cooper, the art club sponsor, has her own theory. “I think it was just an accident.” Mrs. Cooper said, “I think it was because the Sterling Playmakers were in here, maybe our signs got mixed up because they put signs up on the wall too and maybe when they left they accidently grabbed one of our signs.”

Despite the loss of this mural and the others, new plans are already being made to use up the newly freed space. Where the koi fish mural once stood, art four students are working on designs for a new mural that will incorporate the different disciplines of the fine arts department, as well as koi fish to commemorate the former mural. These new plans will hopefully be carried out within the first semester, proving that school spirit will always find a way to leak through the school’s walls one way or another, no matter how many times the walls are painted over.