The Legacy Project: Well-Deserved Recognition

Teachers and schools never get enough positive news coverage. There are miraculous things going on in schools and classrooms everyday and yet, because there are so many, there is no way to cover them all. We always hear about negative things regarding public education but when you walk into a school, you tend to see the great things happening in the school. Here at Lely Elementary, we try to get our story out about all of the great things happening at school. 

One program that we have adopted since last year is the Leader in Me program where we work toward training kids to be leaders and then putting them in situations where they can excel as leaders. As part of that program, we are transforming what we are doing at school. We want both teachers and students to make their mark on our school and, in some cases, leave their mark. One way we are accomplishing this is through our Legacy Project. 

The Legacy Project is a concept that came to us during a Leader in Me Environmental Team meeting. We thought it would be great if the class leaving our school each year, the fifth grade class, would create some kind of physical entity for our school as a memory of them. The effect would be that as the years go by, the outgoing fifth grade classes would lend a hand in beautifying our campus. 

Kirstin Stockwell, our art teacher, bought into the project right away. Since she sees all of the kids in the building and since her class is best geared toward something like this, she led the fifth graders in designing the 2020-21 Legacy Project. After successfully writing a Donors Choose grant for supplies, she had the students create "stained glass" panels using paper and color. The panels range in theme from food to abstract design, but each student's personality shines through their panel. 

One morning, Mrs. Stockwell was hard at work hanging the panes in the wall of windows in the media center. We have since deemed that wall of windows our campus art gallery :) After arranging all of the panels in the windows, we took a look. It was breathtaking. Each panel was an individual work of art, but together, they combined to form an amazing work. This is a point of pride for our fifth grade class, and our entire school. In fact, an anchor at ABC7 News saw the project on Twitter and decided to make it a news story on the six o'clock news. Here is a link to the story: https://vimeo.com/549522270. What a cool thing for kids to see their creations on television.

Our Legacy Project will become a staple of life at Lely Elementary School. In ten years, we will be able to look back on all of the cool new features to our school and note that kids did all of the creating. I'm sure that our campus will look much different in a decade than it does now, and it will all have started with our 2020-21 fifth grade class and Mrs. Stockwell. We could not be more proud of all of them.