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Animals jump from pages to the walls
Photo
Sisters Kim Boccia, left, and Donna McAuley who both have children attending Poland Union Elem School have painted murals on the school library walls.
Two sisters are painting animal murals on the walls of the library.
By Rick Rouan
POLAND — The previously bland walls of the Poland Union Elementary School library have been transformed into a “reading wonderland,” thanks to a pair of sisters.
Donna McAuley and Kim Boccia, both of Poland, are decorating the school’s library walls with animal murals straight from the pages of library books.
“This is for our school, for the kids,” said McAuley, who attended art school at Youngstown State University.
The idea for the murals came to Principal Carmella Smallhoover after Boccia painted a bulldog, the district’s mascot, for the school last year. She asked the sisters to letter the walls to replace paper signs that separated library sections, but McAuley and Boccia wanted to do “something more,” Smallhoover said.
The “something more” turned into murals of animals from library books. An anaconda and a giraffe stand eye-to-eye in one corner while a monkey hangs from a tree in another. An old, white pole is now replaced with a tree made from bulletin-board paper.
“This is something that will be here for a long time,” Smallhoover said.
McAuley and Boccia said they work together frequently and that they balance each other. Boccia said her sister is meticulous and that she is content to be the “wing man.”
“I don’t have the patience she does,” Boccia said.
“She just says ‘What do you think?’ and does it,” McAuley said.
The sisters both have children — Carly Boccia and Jeffrey McAuley — in the school, and their mother, Charlotte Confer, teaches reading at Poland Union, Boccia said.
Boccia said that the students are excited and that her daughter helped paint a spot on the giraffe.
“They are always peeking their heads in here,” she said, adding that a fourth-grader even told them to “keep up the good work.”
The murals have taken about two weeks to paint so far, and the finishing touches on the library should be completed by next week when students start to use the library.
The sisters still plan to re-paint an owl and add a koala bear to the last empty wall.
“It’s like my dad says, ‘It’s not work,’” McAuley said.
“We’re calling it our reading wonderland,” Smallhoover said.
rrouan@vindy.com