Milk, Honey and Xanadu
They
came bearing gifts of milk and honey and a book called “Xanadu.”
No,
they weren’t the three kings of the Orient but Carol Cantrell and Annie Cramer
did come to the Sept. 7 Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board meeting with
a specific purpose: to show board members an example of what the system’s
children were up to in the arts.
Cantrell, who is the lead teacher
for arts education in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School system, said arts
teachers speak to the board during the “Public Comment” portion of the meeting
several times a year.
Because school board members
are often treated to musical and dramatic performances when the meetings are
held at the schools, Cantrell thought it was a good idea for an art teacher
to make a presentation at the Chapel Hill City Hall meeting.
Annie Cramer was the first
teacher to volunteer.
“Not only does the presentation
raise the awareness of the school board pertaining to our arts activities,
but also the general public watching on the cable channel is reminded as well,”
Cantrell said.
Board
meetings at the town hall are broadcasted on Channel 18, the public access
cable channel.
Cramer, who teaches art at
Seawell Elementary, gave each board member small packets of milk and honey
and a copy of “Xanadu,” a book published by the Durham-based organization,
Shakti for Children.
“Xanadu” is a compilation of
North Carolina schoolchildren’s ideas of an ideal world and included in it
is a photo of the mural painted by Seawell fourth-graders in 1997.
Explaining the mural to the
board with proud enthusiasm, Cramer said each fourth-grader created a personal
symbol for the border of Seawell’s Xanadu mural after researching symbols
from Africa, Japan, Egypt, China, Indonesia and other places around the world.
“A math genius even made his
an equation,” Cramer said.
Shakti for Children began the Xanadu project when they were in the process of creating a child’s book called “Children from Australia to Zimbabwe,” Cramer said.
The book featured children
from countries A to Z, but when they came to X, they didn’t have a country.
And so they created “Xanadu the imaginary place.”
A Durham school illustrated
and wrote about Xanadu for the book.
Shakti’s next project was an
entire book on Xanadus and the organization invited Seawell to take part.
Cramer said in a later interview
that the Shakti organization donated 100 paperback copies of the book to school
when it was published in 1999.
She sold these books at face
value—$6.95—to send a student to the Carrboro Arts Center summer camp.
“This
student was very interested in art, and throughout the school year, he would
bring drawings to me that he had done at home,” she said.
After speaking with the school’s
family specialist and principal, Cramer found a camp for the student and used
the profits from the Xanadu book sale.
She would like to revive the
scholarship this year to send several other students to art camps by selling
the remainder of the books. There are almost 90 left, she said.
For
information about purchasing a copy of Xanadu, please contact Cramer through
email at acramer@chccs.k12.nc.us.
Sources
-Annie Cramer, Seawell Elementary School art teacher.
acramer@chccs.k12.nc.us
-Seawell Elementary School’s website (link to Xanadu
mural)
http://eclipse.chccs.k12.nc.us/seawell/