Students in New York City participating in the Border Crossers after-school program studied the issue of unequal funding for schools. They painted this mural and described their artwork:
The first theme is: What is an ideal school? We talked a lot about this in Border Crossers this year. Our idea of a perfect school would be a school that is not very crowded and that has good teachers. Also, a school that has enough materials. One more thing the ideal school has is every race with different colors representing different races. In our mural, the ideal school is in the middle and the unideal schools are in the corners.
The second theme in the mural is tracking. By saying tracking, we are trying to say not to make groups that separate people. And that when immigrants come to America, the tests should be fair to them. We drew pictures of what we would want a fair school to look like.
The third theme is school funding inequity. We wanted to show that every school should have the same amount of money. We also thought that people with less money shouldn’t pay a higher percent of taxes for school than people with more money.
