Students and teachers from Seneca Valley School District's three-building high school campus collaborated to help design a mural to adorn the new aquatics center, expected to open in January.

Seneca Valley School District expects its new aquatics center to be an asset for the whole community.

So, naturally, the district will have members from the three-building high school campus work on a mural for the natatorium.

At the school board meeting Monday, a number of students and faculty discussed what led them to the current final design for the artwork — an 8-foot tall, 16 foot wide mosaic mural — and which steps lie ahead in bringing the ideas to fruition.

Discussing the artwork with administration last summer “led us to this narrative mural that was based on the idea of swimming and diving being a lifelong activity that you can enjoy from early childhood on through later ages,” Aaron Shaffer, Intermediate High School art teacher, said. “That was kind of the drive behind this imagery, but we came to the conclusion that we needed to get more input from students, instead of just coming straight from the artist and from the influences of the teachers.”

The school worked with local artist Elizabeth Klevens to brainstorm what the mural should look like, how it would be pieced together and, ultimately, to create the artwork itself.

Senior high school art teacher Jason Woolslare said public art has always been a goal of the department, and this opportunity for a mural in the aquatics center really brings that goal to life. While public displays of artwork are a faculty goal, Woolslare expanded, that doesn't mean the actual art should stem from the teachers.

“We all agreed that the students should be driving this idea, and the students should be taking ownership of what is going to be a public space and a usable space for many years,” he said.

The department convoked an “eclectic” team of students — not just those who were enrolled in art classes — to look at many examples of public art from different eras to come up with a display that can be aesthetically pleasing, relate back to Seneca Valley, and tell a story.

As is appropriate to a natatorium, the final design relates back to swimming — but the shapes and imagery came from the students and swimmers within the group.

Senior student Simren Jayaraman said ideas tossed around included having waves of water that splash up onto different walls, including the audience, because a number of swimmers consider it an “important aspect” and viewing swimmers from numerous perspectives.

Brian Whitney, a senior student on the swim team, said he views the mural as a way of bridging the gap between the present and the future — between students who are here now and those who will use the pool in the future. He added, however, that the piece of art is for the public to enjoy, rather than only the swimmers, so a number of ideas, such as including swim team chants somewhere in the mural, had to be nixed from the final draft.

Having students involved in drafting the mural won't be the only way it will be a truly campus-wide project either, the teachers said.

Klevens “would actually grid this whole design off and break it up into sections, so each individual section then can be done by a group within an individual class,” Shaffer said. “Whether it be a seventh-grade class or a ninth-grade class, a senior career arts class, they can work on segments of that and then it would all be pieced together when it's installed in the wall.”

The natatorium is expected to open in January 2021, and it will replace the current pool, which is more than 50 years old.