Within each person there is an artist. Whether someone sees it or not can be controversial, but on the inside, he or she possesses some form of creativity. Some write stories or create grand sculptures, while others just stick to drawing. What people do not realize is that there are many different works of art displayed all throughout the school that people tend to walk past everyday. These works of art are the ceiling tiles that mark the pathways to the English, fine arts, foreign language and social studies hallways, and line the ceilings of certain classrooms. These ceiling tiles show the many creative abilities of students in ways that express who these students are as people.

There are certain teachers throughout the school who allow students to paint ceiling tiles in their rooms, or create projects that help students use the knowledge they learned in class and apply it in more creative ways.

“It was a different way to do an assignment, unlike the typical presentation type stuff,” senior Karley Rosenquist said. “I wanted to kind of mix it up and get out there because I like doing creative things like painting and drawing just for fun. So that really interested me, and I figured just to switch it up.”

This gives many students the opportunity to be more creative and make the project feel less like an assignment. Though not all the ceiling tiles around the school were projects created by teachers.

Many of the ceiling tiles around the school are not really projects. Most of them, including the ones in some of the math classrooms, were made by students who asked certain teachers if they could paint them just for fun.

“Kids just did them, they asked me if they could have a ceiling tile, I said yes, and they took them home for the fun of it,” math teacher Andrew Benton said.

“I didn’t make it an assignment, it was just kind of random,” math teacher Arnold Glapajone said. “I had some students that asked me if their tiles could line the ceiling of the room.”

Some students liked to put sayings or inside jokes that they remembered from that certain class into their tiles.

“I noticed that inside jokes that I wouldn’t think of they would put down,” Benton said. “This one girl wrote down ‘coma county’ which is what I called their class because they were so quiet.”

Many of the ceiling tiles reflect something new about certain students that might have been hidden.

“I had a student who made a ceiling tile, and she put the word ‘explore’ on it with kind of a cool back drop, but that showed me a different side of her,” Glapajone said. “Telling me the she’s more adventurous than I would have thought previously.”

The tiles showed the out-of-the-box creativity in students. It showed how certain students were able to take things that seemed unusable and turn them into something extraordinary.

“One girl that was always eyeing the ceiling tile was like ‘Can I have a ceiling tile,” Benton said. “I said fine and I gave her a broken one. I didn’t know what she was going to do with it, but then she made this awesome sun-moon masterpiece and I was blown away.”

Students every day pass these magical works of art without even realizing the bigger meaning that is hidden within them. It shows how students were able to express the things they enjoyed most in their school year, along with revealing a little more about themselves in the process.