COUNTYWIDE : Students Draw Upon Their Imaginations

If the creative designs of second-graders from Laurel Elementary School in Brea ever become reality, traffic will be eased in the next century by automobiles and bicycles that can fly, sail and travel underwater.

“When we’re old, like 30, we’ll have cars that can fly,” Abraham Reynoso, 8, said Wednesday outside the Caltrans office in Santa Ana, where he and 25 of his classmates were honored for their first-place mural in the agency’s “Future of Transportation” contest.

Classmate Melissa Holyfield, 7, quickly added: “You can’t pollute the air if you can ride a bike in the sky.”

Fifteen second-grade classes from Brea, Orange, Fullerton, Placentia and Santa Ana competed in the mural contest, sponsored by Caltrans and Irvine-based Mazda of North America.

Entries were created using a variety of mediums, from construction paper cut to form space vehicles to plastic tubing shaped to simulate a monorail. But it was the Laurel students’ brightly colored crayon drawings of versatile vehicles that can go anywhere that wowed the judges.

The mural will go on display at John Wayne Airport later this month.

After the ceremony, the children were treated to lunch and a tour of Mazda’s design facility. The grand prize also includes $100 that their teacher, Joanne Galvan, will use to buy learning materials.

Teachers in the runner-up classrooms also received $100 awards: Kathleen Davis of Esplanade Elementary in Orange; Maggie Miller of Santiago Elementary in Santa Ana; Janet Petti of Mariposa Elementary in Brea, and Elisa Clark of Valencia Park Elementary in Fullerton.

The murals are part of a program that teaches students about transportation planning, including traffic-cutting measures and automobile development. Students were asked to theorize what transportation could be like in the next 100 years and re-create their ideas for the poster.

Judging by their renderings, what they got from the program was an inspired bit of current technology mixed with the kind used by the space-age cartoon family the Jetsons.

“We learned that in the future when people are stuck in traffic they can get out by flying,” said 7-year-old Humberto Gomez. “There will also be less pollution with the cars in the future.”

Student Ashley Hofmeyer proved that the children had picked up on the message Caltrans and the teachers had hoped to get across: “We found out that it will help if people change their way of life and if we drive less.”