Elementary school student inspires Banneker Community Center mural

The Banneker Community Center isn’t impressive. Easily overlooked on the west side of Bloomington, it doesn’t command attention.\nInside, visitors are greeted by a set of stairs that squeak with each step, revealing its age. Downstairs sits a small room the size of one in a typical student’s apartment.\nUsually this room – located at 930 W. Seventh St. – is filled with elementary school students playing after school, but not today. Lined with green tape, the walls will soon be the recipients of one third-grader’s artistic design.\n“I want it to be like outside,” said Alendrea Dantzler, a Fairview Elementary School student.\nHer simple idea-turned-drawing became the theme to remodel the Banneker playroom.\nAs one of the many grants donated by the city of Bloomington’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission, the Bloomington Environmental Commission received $160 to make a mural in the kids’ after–school playroom.\nMonday was the first step of many to transform Alendrea’s art into educational decor.\nAt 8 a.m., community volunteers and members of the Environmental Commission started transforming the white walls and paneling into a rolling landscape with a blue sky and clouds.\nEnvironmental Commission member Kriste Lindberg spearheaded the “green” painting, which she hopes will educate the kids about how to be better stewards of the environment.\nThe commission will spread its message of environmentalism to the kids by using volatile organic compound–based paint that is better \nabsorbed by the atmosphere. Lindberg wants a place that makes the kids feel more at home than the old, drab white walls.\nBanneker Community Center was one of 53 organizations to benefit from Bloomington’s “A Day ON, Not A Day OFF!,” a national effort to promote service projects on the holiday.\nIn all, more than $17,000 will be spent on different service projects locally.\nThe Environmental Commission spent its funds buying paint and supplies, most of which were purchased at a discounted price. Aver’s Gourmet Pizza supplied food to the volunteers, who came in as they could throughout the day.\nLindberg prepped the room last week, cleaning the walls and moving the furniture into the middle of the room so the volunteers could paint.\nNow, two dark silver desks hold two HP computers. Crafts and children’s toys sit on a foosball table and a couch, as random game pieces float around the room.\nOn the top of one stack is a single Monopoly Chance card. It reads, “Pay poor tax of $15.”\nWalking out of the Banneker gym, Casey Donnelly, assistant to Banneker’s director, headed toward the white Parks and Recreation Department van parked illegally in the yellow no-parking zone with its headlights on.\n“True Banneker style,” Donnelly jested.\nDonnelly drove east toward campus before making a detour past Crestmont housing community, where a lot of the kids that go to Banneker live.\nOn his way to Crestmont, Donnelly pulled the car over to the side of the road.\n“Hold on,” he said, getting out and walking over to check on an elderly man in a blue Geo Metro that had lost its right front wheel.\nDonnelly returned and restarted the van.\n“He’s all right. He said a tow truck was on its way,” Donnelly said, continuing down the road. “That’s an underlying problem with society – we don’t help each other out enough.”\nMost of the Banneker children attend Fairview Elementary School, which is essentially an inner-city school, Donnelly said.\n“It’s a different world here; there’s problems with drugs and violence and these kids live with it,” he said, pointing out houses of children he knows who live in Crestmont.\nRoughly 75 percent of the children who attend Banneker after school live below the poverty line, Donnelly said as he passed rows of small, one-story houses.\n“I was in college before I saw most of the things these kids see,” he said. “I know people who won’t even drive around here.”\nAfter five years of working with the kids, Donnelly said it’s hard not to be cynical. Still, he finds hope – especially with help from groups such as the Environmental Commission.\n“They are incredible kids,” he said. “They deserve nice things. They deserve the things rich kids get.”\nLindberg wanted the kids to take ownership of the mural and put a little bit of themselves into the community.\n“I’m just the facilitator bringing it all together,” Lindberg said. “The kids are in charge.”\nThe project is ongoing, and children will be encouraged to add their own scenes to the mural to make it their own.\n“I just can’t wait to be here tomorrow and see their faces,” Lindberg said. “I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it.”\nAlendrea said she wanted to add children playing in a park to the wall.\n“I’m going to write right above it: ‘Everything in peace. It’s MLK, he died in peace,’” Alendrea said. “He changed the world.”