EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY: UNIVERSITY, YOUNGER STUDENTS COLLABORATE ON MURAL AT CIVIC CENTER

The newest addition to Cape Girardeau's growing gallery of murals is taking shape on a scarred wall in the windowless gym at the Cape Girardeau Civic Center. It is a montage of trees and houses and hills meant to illustrate what the children who go to the center like about their community.

"You need to celebrate the good things about where you are," says Pat Reagan, an art professor at Southeast Missouri State University.

The mural is a collaboration between the children at the center and students at Southeast working on a community project for a class called Freshman Experience. Reagan's class and one taught by Katherine Ellinger Smith are contributing to the mural.

Both the young and older students are learning from the project.

The children at the center are doing all of the painting, and they devised the design.

"The college students wanted to design it," said Reagan. "(We) said, No this is their mural."

To arrive at a design, the students first sat down with the children at the center and drew pictures for a week. They asked them what they like about their community.

In the beginning they drew basketball pictures and favorite singers. "The first day was horrible," said Southeast freshman Megan D'Urso of Florissant, Mo., an art education major.

Once the children began to understand what a mural is, other images began to emerge -- trees, flowers, swing sets, churches.

Gradually the university students began to understand that producing a sparkling work of art isn't the purpose of this project. "It should be getting them to participate," D'Urso said.

"It doesn't matter what it looks like," says Josh Huck, a marketing major from St. Louis

D'Urso loves working with the kids. "Getting them excited about art is what I plan on doing for the rest of my life," she said.

The children have been painting almost every day for the past three weeks. Each one pulls a plastic trash bag over their head for protection from the acrylic paint. At that, "Half of them go home with paint all over the place," says Willa Hamilton, the after school coordinator at the center.

The professors at first were concerned that the children wouldn't be able to stay focused on the work, Reagan said. "But you see some of them are so patient -- they really care."

They also have talent. "I think artistic talent had to do with having the patience to carry things through," she said.

Josh Langley, a second-grader at Blanchard School, is one of the students who takes special care to make sure every brush stroke counts.

Earlier this week, Blanchard third-grader Jessica Harris was painting the sky. "I was over there with green," she said, "but I got tired of green."

Originally home to a hardware store and a car dealership, the building at 232 Broadway has housed the civic center since 1984. Hamilton said the administration loved the idea when proposed by the art professors.

"It brightens the place," she said. "I wish we could put something at that level all the way around."

The children at the center are painting two 12-by-6 1/2-foot panels separated by a vertical column. When they finish the mural next week, the students will put their handprints and signatures on the column.

They plan to finish the mural next week and have a party to celebrate.

Ellinger said her students initially were nervous about the project. But everyone has learned something important from the collaboration, Reagan says.

"Students don't always trust that something good is going to happen."