Making A Difference in Your Community : Art Pals Cross the Valley to Make Friends

Adults, not children, are the ones who have learned to make distinctions among themselves, Beverly Mednick has concluded from her work with Art Pals.

“Kids are more tuned into the similarities,” said Mednick, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at Van Nuys Elementary whose children have been participating in Art Pals. That’s a new program in which children from her generally lower-income, Spanish-speaking school exchange art projects with students at Lanai Road Elementary School in Encino.

“They can learn about each other and about each other’s background,” said Nancy Kim, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at Lanai Road, a largely English-speaking and typically higher-income school than Van Nuys Elementary.

Helene Schacter of Hidden Hills, a volunteer with the National Council of Jewish Women, started the Art Pals program with 64 students from the two schools in September, saying that she wanted to do something to deal with the rising alienation among people today.

Under Art Pals, a student in one school is paired with a student in the other. But rather than exchange letters--like pen pals--they exchange projects from their art classes.

The program builds understanding because the children need not speak the same language to communicate through art, Kim said.

Within a month of starting the program, the students from both schools were already clamoring to meet with their Art Pals, Schacter said. “We didn’t expect that kind of success in that short a time.”

The students met for the first time in January, and they are going on their first field trip together today to Barnsdall Art Center in Hollywood.

Schacter is an art educator who retired from the West Valley Jewish Community Center preschool program five years ago. She wants to expand the Art Pals program to other schools and needs volunteers, with or without experience as art educators, to help. The only requirement is to love children, she said.

The idea for Art Pals grew out of Schacter’s volunteer work with the National Council of Jewish Women, which runs an art and literacy tutoring program for homeless children at the Valley Shelter in North Hollywood, Schacter said.

“What we discovered is that children learn about each other because they are sharing things with each other,” Schacter said of Art Pals.

It is not so much that the program tears down walls between two dissimilar groups as that it keeps the children from putting up the walls that might otherwise develop as they grow older and lose some of their innocence, Mednick said.

“There’s a little bit of a communication gap, but children tend to be able to bridge that,” Mednick said. The students have become good friends; they write letters and exchange home phone numbers.

The program also helps the children approach art from new perspectives by discovering how someone at another school handled a similar assignment, Kim said.

To become a volunteer with the Art Pals program, call Schacter at the National Council of Jewish Women, (213) 651-2930.

Other volunteering opportunities:

The Organization for the Needs of the Elderly in Reseda is searching for volunteer drivers to deliver meals to frail, homebound seniors on weekday mornings. For more information, call Keri Howard, Homebound Meals Coordinator, (818) 705-2345.

Dreams to Reality, a Burbank-based charity that helps people who have AIDS, is seeking sincere, genuine letters by and about teen-agers who have been affected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The youths could either have the virus or have a loved one with the disease. Selected letters will be read by celebrities at the group’s annual AIDS education and awareness fund-raiser, “Secrets and Letters,” at 8 p.m. April 21 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles.

Getting Involved is a weekly listing of volunteering opportunities. Please address prospective listings to Getting Involved, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, 91311. Or fax them to (818) 772-3338.