Selvidge Students Liven Up School Hallway with Painted Lockers

Heading into the end the 2024-2025 school year, Selvidge Middle seventh-grader Saanvi was searching for a service-learning project she could complete for her Academic Stretch class, an experience that would benefit the school community as well as result in personal growth.

Inspiration struck as she walked Selvidge’s hallways, in the form of a bank of 25 empty lockers outside of Spanish teacher Julia Buehler Diener’s classroom.

“There are murals on the walls of our school for each eighth-grade year, so I wanted to do something like that for the lockers,” said Saanvi, now finishing up her eighth-grade year. “I wanted to add something and make them more lively. I love reading, and I thought the book spines looked nice next to everything.”

Saanvi recruited 13 of her friends – all of whom would be heading into sixth, seventh or eighth grade at Selvidge this school year – and got to work sanding and priming the lockers in April and May 2025.

She and classmates Akshara and Emily compiled a list of books to represent on the lockers – a mixture of classics, personal favorites and ones with cool spine designs – then the group started painting over the summer.

By mid-July, the project was done: 25 formerly blank lockers are now pieces of art.

“A lot of teachers came up to me – especially Señora B next door – and she said it looked really good and that she was really happy it was there to decorate what used to be plain,” Saanvi said.

Saanvi worked on the project with fellow eighth-graders Lasya, Dhanasri, Emily, Aubriana, Akshara, Saanvi and Akshaya; seventh-graders Sai, Helena and Sagashra; and sixth-graders Deeya, Teju and Sai.  

Dhanasri said she and her friends joined the project after Saanvi emailed them to gauge their interest.

“Saanvi is a good friend of ours, and we thought it would be a good idea. It’s a nice way to give back,” Dhanasri said. “The cool part was we had an overhead projector, so we could project an image onto the locker. You could adjust how zoomed it was into the locker and, once you got it to fit, you just traced it with the paint and colored it in.”

Becky Porter, Selvidge’s Academic Stretch teacher, said she appreciated how Saanvi involved incoming sixth-graders in the project, students who weren’t even at Selvidge yet when the work began.

At orientation and on the first day of school, the students enjoyed hearing positive reviews from their peers, staff members and parents.

“When I was walking past the painted lockers, I heard a bunch of people saying it was so cool and pointing out different books and names,” Helena said.

As Saanvi and her classmates prepare to head into high school, they know they can always come back to Selvidge and see a very real reminder of the positive impact they left.

And the sixth- and seventh-graders both get to enjoy their artwork every day when they return for the 2026-2027 school year.

“It was nice because we got to see all our hard work pay off,” Deeya said. “It looks better because it has a mural, it’s a lot brighter and it looks really good.”