GLENDALE : Students Paint a Look at Their Neighborhoods

Some children view their neighborhoods as part of a larger city or as big, open playgrounds, while others envision the ocean--replete with octopuses and sharks--right in their back yard.

These images appeared in posters drawn, colored and painted by elementary school children for the first annual “I Love My Neighborhood” poster contest sponsored by the Glendale Clean Committee.

The committee, composed of business people and officials from the city and the Glendale Unified School District, received about 3,500 entries from children in 18 of the district’s elementary schools and several parochial schools.

Grand-prize winner Arpa Aghajani’s poster depicts a towheaded youngster thinking about his neighborhood in a heart-shaped bubble--a form common to cartoons. In the bubble are two multicolored homes smiling at one another and a sun with a happy face.

The words “I Love My Neighborhood” appear off to the side of the bubble, done up in bright primary colors with black polka dot and plaid patterns drawn over the letters.

Arpa, 11, was all smiles when committee members revealed at an awards ceremony last week that her first-place poster would be professionally reproduced and put up throughout the city.

“I’m really surprised--I had no idea,” the sixth-grader at Balboa School said.

Arpa and other schoolchildren who garnered a first, second or third prize in the contest received crayons, dolls and games.

Ruth Lurie from Monte Vista School, a third-place winner in the fifth-grade category, enclosed her neighborhood in a rectangle with the words “cool schools, no traffic, cool neighbors, nice people, nice scenery,” encircling it.

Sixth-grader Marc Wells from Glenoaks School wrote on his poster “Everyone in the world is my neighbor.” He drew a circle of people with each one representing a different nationality, including Vietnamese, Thai, German, Greek, Irish, Russian, Armenian and Hebrew.

The contest was designed to help children take pride in their communities, said Lynda Rocamora, Board of Education member.

A sense of pride will help youngsters take care of the neighborhood they live in by recycling, watching out for their neighbors and taking care of their homes, said Lin Weeshoff, a fifth-grade teacher at Cerritos School.