Springdale Public Schools EAST students preserve stories

By Mary Jordan/Springdale Public Schools

Springdale High School and Sonora Middle School Education Accelerated by Service and Technology students have taken on the task of preserving the stories of more than 13,000 child abuse survivors.

“I see empathy. I see a generation that wants to help,” said Derek Ratchford,?Sonora Middle School ?EAST facilitator. “I see kids that are willing to do anything to help their neighbors or their community.”

EAST ?is an Arkansas-based worldwide initiative to provide students the opportunity to use technology in support of life-changing educational experiences with a service-based focus.

“They get opportunities that you don't really get in any other class or another environment,” said Bayleigh Jones,?Springdale High School ?EAST facilitator. “It's a great marriage between, school and fun and real impact in the community.”

The Sonora and Springdale High programs are using technology to preserve more than 13,000 handprints of children who’ve received care at the?Children’s Safety Center ?in Springdale.

The CSC is a community-based nonprofit that was founded in 1997 with the goal of facilitating more-effective prevention, detection, investigation and treatment of child abuse, according to the organization’s website.

The center provided services to 632 children in 2021, said Peyton Stewman, CSC strategic partnerships coordinator. The number of children impacted by child abuse the center serves continues to increase, and has grown by about 25% this year.

Child abuse impacts one in 10 children before the age of 18, she said.

“We deal with physical, sexual abuse, cases of neglect and witnesses to violence,” Stewman said, adding the CSC provides one location through which children can receive support.

Every child served by the center over the last 25 years has put a handprint on the CSC’s walls as a symbol of hope and understanding that they’re not alone, Stewman said. Overtime, virtually every wall of the 5,000-square-foot facility has been covered with colorful representations of the Washington County children the organization serves.

“As a kid that had to walk in here, it just gave me a sense of hope,” said Abigail Livingston, of the handprints. Livingston is a 2022 graduate of Har-Ber High School and a child abuse survivor who was served by the center.

Livingston said she first came to the CSC in 2019 when she heard another child abuse survivor share their story. It was then she understood that abuse she had experienced as young as 6 years old wasn’t how love should be expressed.

“I didn't realize how broken it was until I actually heard another survivor story,” she said.

Growing need

The increasing need to support abused children has led to the necessity of building a new center, which the CSC broke ground on in June, Stewman said. The new facility will be three times the size of the current center at about 15,000 square feet.

The organization is anticipated to open at its new location on Gene George Boulevard south of Arvest Ballpark in September 2023, she said. It’s not feasible to include the physical handprints in the move, so the Springdale Public Schools EAST programs have chosen to use technology to help the children’s stories live on.

Sonora Middle School’s program has created a 360-degree virtual tour of the center, while Springdale High School EAST students have digitally photographed every handprint and are currently organizing the files by color so they can be used in support of CSC initiatives.

The colorful reminders of child abuse survivors range from a three-month-old’s foot print to the broad hands of 18-year-olds, Stewman said.

Livingston’s handprint means so much to her that she made a deal with a staff member to cut hers out of the wall when the center relocates, she said. Her handprint is blue because it’s her favorite color and white because she loves how hopeful and pure the color is.

She has handprints she made on paper that same day framed and on display in her room as a reminder, Livingston said.

“It brings up a lot of emotions,” she said. “It also brings hope, because I get to see how far I’ve come and the healing I’ve been through.”

The tour

Erica Martinez, Takumi Espino and Genesis Alba, former Sonora Middle School students, worked to create the virtual tour using a 360-degree camera and computer apps and programs, Ratchford said.

Espino said it was his first time working with a 360-degree camera.

“I really enjoy working with all the different, new stuff I've never worked with before. It's a great experience,” he said. “I believe that there's so much more that I could do with the knowledge.”

The students took 38 photos with the 360-degree camera and “stitched” them together using computer programs, Alba said.

The students then created clickable icons through which individual children’s stories could be shared.

“We used the iPad to draw all the icons for each kid that had a story,” Espino said. “When you click on the icon, the story pops up.”

The hardest part of the project was reading and importing the stories, Alba said.

“It was really tough for them,” Alba said, of the children who made handprints.

Martinez said she continues to be impacted by the project.

“I do think about the kids and their stories,” she said. “I go through things, but I also want to learn about what other people go through.”

The students have all moved on to become eighth-graders at Lakeside Junior High School, but the impact of their work continues to be felt.

“They're just kids like us,” Espino said. “I can't imagine having to go through stuff that they have gone through.”

Sonora’s EAST program has about 120 participants, Ratchford said.

Impactful images

Springdale High School’s EAST students continue to work with more than 13,000 digital images, Jones said, noting about 15 students in all have participated in the project. Springdale High’s EAST program has about 140 enrolled students this year.

The high schoolers began taking digital photographs of every handprint in November 2021 and worked until the end of the 2021-22 school year to capture all the images.

“They make sure that it looks good before they are done,” Jones said of every image the students photographed.

The students who were working on the project last year have all graduated, Jones said, but their peers are continuing the project as they refine every image through Photoshop and sort photos by color to be used as the CSC needs in the future.

“Some of my kids are working on taking the background out so it's just an individual image that can be used for whatever purpose the center wants," Jones said. “We'll share our files."

Immediate plans are for the CSC to use the images in support of an art installation and to create wallpaper and stickers, she said.

Tyrese Jude, Springdale High graduate, said it takes about one minute to refine and organize each handprint, resulting in about 217 hours of effort for that task alone.

Student ownership is key to the EAST program’s success Jones said, adding teachers serve as facilitators to help students achieve their goals.

“I know the power of that classroom and the projects they are doing,” Stewman said, who was a?Springdale Schools ?EAST student herself. “Those kids have been incredibly patient and kind and worked with us so well.”

Tomorrow’s survivors

The CSC is continuing to make handprints of the children they serve by putting them on canvasses that will be hung in and can be moved around the new facility, Stewman said. Putting them on canvases will help the center date when handprints are made as well, something they’ve never been able to do before.

“I think that will be really interesting to see color inspiration and all those sorts of things from kids as they're grouped together,” she said.

Maintaining the tradition of creating and preserving handprints is important to the center, the children the prints represent and the Springdale community, she said.

“People don't want to see them go away, because they're real stories, and they're human stories,” Stewman said. “Northwest Arkansas is growing, but it's still a small community.”

She said the EAST programs have taken a huge weight off the shoulders of the center’s staff, who were at a loss as to what to do with the meaningful handprints when the center relocated.

“They really are our inspiration every day. They push us forward,” Stewman said of the handprints. “Those stories are what we do. They're our mission. They represent everything that we're about.”

Livingston said what the handprints represent will always remain valuable to her and other child abuse survivors served by the CSC.

“Yes, I had a terrible thing happened to me, but I'm a survivor,” she said. “I got past that and there's hope on the other side.”