CNN.com - Do brighter walls make brighter students? - Dec 19, 2005

CNN.com - Do brighter walls make brighter students? - Dec 19, 2005:


NEW YORK (AP) -- A project to spruce up dreary hallways at inner city schools is based on a simple idea: Bright walls make for brighter students.

Publicolor, a program in which students are permitted to paint over the industrial shades of their schools' interiors, is credited by school officials with lowering dropout rates, decreasing discipline problems and increasing attendance.

The program, now a decade old, has already redecorated 71 schools in blighted city neighborhoods.

"This is probably the best kept secret in New York City," said P.S. 69 principal Alan Cohen, whose Bronx school was painted earlier this year. "I love Publicolor. It has changed my school from the inside out."

Many students feel the same way.

On Thursday, 14-year-old Pedro Rodriguez was busy splashing oriole orange and apple green paints on the walls. The old colors, he said, "sometimes would make you feel down."

The dull colors on tile walls at P.S. 34 gave way to shimmering lime, teal blast, yellow flash, tangerine zing and blue wave. The bright shades contrasted with the tall grayish buildings in the surrounding neighborhood.

"I like doing work now and I actually like being inside the school building," Rodriguez said.

Ruth Lande Shuman, an industrial designer who created the program, said Publicolor has far surpassed her expectations and won over once skeptical city school officials.

"They didn't understand that schools are not meant to look like prisons," Shuman said. "I was, frankly, horrified by how hostile these schools looked and felt."

Alarmed by accounts of the city's dropout rates at some schools in the early 1990s, Shuman said she wondered how to help engage disinterested students.

"I thought color," said Shuman, who has researched the colors' psychological effects. "Color has enormous power. It can make you feel sad. It can make you feel happy. It can make you feel energetic or lethargic."

Shuman began simply, by providing paint and brushes to students and letting them transform drab walls and doorways into colorful entrances and pathways that set them apart in blighted neighborhoods.
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Ruth Shuman is the Founder and President of Publicolor.

Over the years, she has created educational programs to accompany the painting tasks so that students who found themselves taking a new interest in their schools could take a new interest in their studies, too.

Soon, the organization was providing tutoring, career counseling and college preparation lessons, along with arranging summer internships and jobs.

The program blossomed to other parts of neighborhoods. Students and paint cans soon showed up at police precincts, senior citizens centers and homeless shelters. More of these facilities have now been painted than schools.

The program has a staff of 30 full- and part-time workers. About 3,000 New Yorkers volunteer to help the students paint each year. Publicolor estimates 60 to 100 students at each school are directly involved in painting efforts.

One Wall Street financial firm has begun providing 50 employees to tutor students, instructing a population of youngsters in which 90 percent of those who go to college are the first in their family to do so.

Educational consultants have taken an interest. A high school in Oregon called, and students there went to work with brushes and paint.

The response was not always enthusiastic when the program started in 1994, Shuman said. One teacher insisted her classroom door would not be repainted. Another belittled a student painter's effort.

"Were they breaking down our doors saying, 'Come into our schools?' Absolutely not," she said.