Rollings students paint nursing home -

The sight of students crawling across the floor and climbing up and down the walls might be enough to give some teachers a headache; however, Meg Skow, visual arts teacher at Rollings Middle School of the Arts, looked on proudly as 22 seventh- and eighth-grade Rollings students recently painted two rooms at the Hallmark HealthCare Center – a nursing home in Summerville.
Like a swarm of locusts, the Rollings students dispersed throughout the nursing home’s day rooms, making sure that every inch of the previously white walls was covered with blue, green and brown paint. Some students used ladders to paint the highest points of the walls, while others knelt to paint along the bottom.
Mary Ann Westerholm, the center’s assistant director of nursing, was thrilled that the students had undertaken the task of painting the rooms.
“We’ve been wanting to do something with the day rooms for a long time,” Westerholm said. “The residents spend a good amount of their time in these rooms so we’re just really excited about this.”
Westerholm and her coworkers discussed what they wanted painted in the day rooms and agreed upon a beach scene, which Skow thought was a wonderful idea.
“A beach scene is good because there is a lot of forgiveness in the design,” Skow said. “My students did some preliminary sketches and we combined those with pictures of beach scenes to come up with the design.”
Their final design included a beach house with shudders, palm trees and an ocean under a partly cloudy sky.
Skow, who provided the students with guidance throughout the process, hoped that the freshly painted rooms would be more than just aesthetically pleasing.
“If residents have dementia problems, seeing scenes that they’re familiar with from their childhood or experiences that they previously had has been shown to be helpful,” Skow said.
The students, who are all members of the National Junior Arts Honors Society, spent nearly 10 hours at the nursing home. Rollings student Caitlin Carroll enjoyed both the experience of painting the rooms with her classmates and the way the project turned out.
“In my opinion, it looks great,” Carroll said. “I’m just really glad that we could do this and hope everyone likes it.”

Contact Michael Tannebaum at 873-9424 ext. 215 or mtannebaum@journalscene.com