Sopori Elementary School in Amado wants to get kids interested in art and leading the charge is 21-year-old Mikayla Fierro.
Between growing up in Amado, attending Sopori and working as an instructional aide there, Mikayla has a strong connection to the school and has taken on the task of opening students’ imaginations.
“I started drawing and a few students saw my drawings and asked if they could color them,” she said. “I figured, you know what, I’ll make my own personal coloring book for them. I'll draw some people that I think they find interesting and it just took off from there.”
Mia Fierro, a special education aide and Mikayla’s 26-year-old sister, had the same thought.
“I think it's good because it shows kids more of imagination,” Mia said. “Because some kids tend to lose it when they get older.”
Mikayla always had an interest in art, especially drawing, and despite falling out of the hobby for a while, she managed to find her way back through her job.
“Once I started working here, it was perfect timing because I was able to actually express any ideas that I was able to have,” she said. “It did a lot for me. It expanded some of the techniques that I used to do.”
Now, she’s in charge of staffing the school’s new art cart during recess, which gives students an option to create art or hit the playground.
Mia, who is more focused on painting than drawing, helps run the initiative.
“When I started last year, a lot of the kids wanted to draw or just do something because they were bored of just playing on the playground,” Mia said. “So I asked if we could do an art cart.”
The art cart is outside almost every day at recess, weather permitting, and consists of two buckets, one with paint supplies and one with basic art supplies such as paper, scissors and markers. It also includes folders filled with coloring pages printed from the web and those Mikayla created for the students.
Not only do they enjoy coloring Mikayla’s drawings, the students are drawn to the motivational posters she made to encourage them during state testing.
“They look forward to seeing my drawings every now and then, and then they saw my posters and loved it even more,” she said. “I'm actually working on a few more of those as well for the gym.”
The posters were Mikayla’s first time working with colored pencils.
“We think that showing that creative side, they'll be able to see that we see you, and we just want them to know that we're there for them,” she said. “I believe those posters are an effective way to show them that, considering they see them every day.”
Mikayla is also taking on a much larger task — painting the Sopori mascot in the center of the basketball court.
“It's a very different experience for me, especially since it's a very big project and it's very wide as well,” she said. “It's going to be a learning curve, that's for sure.”
The project will take shape this summer when new lines are painted on the court. Until then, Mikayla is finding other projects to work on.
“As for right now, I think I'm going to do my best to put more out there, more encouraging stuff out there and around the school, and show them that you can be creative wherever you are,” she said.
Her first target is the library, something she hopes to expand in the future.
“I want to try adding more of my art to the library,” she said. “I’m interested in becoming a librarian so that I can fully be able to do what I want in there creatively. That is my main goal for that whole library and around the school as well.”
Mikayla loves doing art but says the most rewarding part is guiding students to do their best and create their own art.
“I’ll teach them the steps into doing what they want to draw. They'll get the hang of it and they'll love it,” she said. “I'm hoping that once they do, they'll be inspired and show that even though I didn't know how at first, I did go and try regardless.”