Brentwood Art Students Reach Out to Joplin

Students in two Joplin, MO, elementary schools will thank about 20 students for making their surroundings a little more inspiring. The high school students are a part of Art Works, a school art club that uses the students' talents for community service.

Brentwood art teacher Tim Rempel’s outside artists group wanted to help out the Joplin tornado victims in some way. Some of the school buildings were beyond repair and needed to be rebuilt. In the meantime, those students will meet in modular buildings.

“They said the one thing that they really would like, since we’re an artists group, was to do paintings and photographs, one for each classroom,” Rempel said. Many of the Joplin teachers lost all teaching materials and posters in the tornado.

Rempel’s group organized the effort, and he submitted two designs for 3x5 posters (since time was short, he did that part of it without student input). The designs were accepted, and now the Art Works students are hard at work.

They’re painting the posters, which Rempel had already sketched the designs on, after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The students also meet on Saturdays, but they don’t seem to mind the work.

“It’s important to give to people who are less fortunate, because they couldn’t help if they had a natural disaster to their school,” sophomore Deja Price said.

Sophomores Price and Tyrese Graves and seniors Rashaad Jordan and Mary Hager were in the art room last week painting on two of the posters. These two posters are of a large eagle, with the word SOAR painted in the sky.

It just worked out that the Joplin schools and Brentwood have a connection they didn’t know about – they're both the Eagles.

“If it happened to my school, I would like to see a picture of an eagle soaring, because we’re the Eagles too," Price said. "We both have the same school mascot.”

Rempel said the students are really taking their time to get the posters just right.

“They’ve been through a lot so we want to make sure that they’re really nice,” Rempel said. He hopes that when the new schools are built they take the posters with them.

The group has until Sunday to finish its work. All the completed art works will be caravanned to Joplin. If it’s a Friday, Rempel, and maybe some of the students, will go along to see the art hung in the schools.

Price said she’d like to go if she could. “It’s very important,” she said. “I just wanted to give. Community service basically is the background of everything.”

“I love to paint and I love art,” Graves said. “I know it would mean a lot to those kids, to know that somebody is caring.”