Pablo Cruz
Staff Writer
Students in Beth Coast’s art classes as well as other artistic Titans have been designing a mural about the timeline of Alexandria City High School, spanning from the school’s opening to present day. The mural will include important events such as in 1967 when the first class of T.C. Williams graduated, the success of ACHS’s football team in the 70s that inspired the hit movie Remember the Titans and more recently, the Covid spike and name change from T. C. Williams High School to Alexandria City High School because of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Ms. Coast’s Ceramics II class started designing the mural last year, and students are still working on it. They are planning on finishing the mural by the end of March.
“This mural is going to have a profound impact on Alexandria City High School,” said senior Emory Stouffer, the mastermind behind the mural. “We can express the way ACHS functions through art.”
Stouffer said that ACHS doesn’t have a profound piece of art to signify the history of the school.
“We felt like we needed a timeline somewhere in the school because it had been missing for a long time,” he said, mentioning that he came up with the idea of the mural but got help from the former Head of Operations at ACHS, Mark Eisenhour, in order to come up with a design.
Stouffer came up with the idea when he had to do an Eagle Scout Project in order to reach the Eagle Scout Rank (the highest rank in Scouts). He wanted to create something that would have a larger impact on the community.
The goal of the mural is to represent ACHS’s history, said Stouffer, and shine a light on ACHS’s name change and how it has affected our community.
“The main idea of the mural is to signify the rich history of our school,” he said. “We live in an area where there are a lot of things going on related back to history. Alexandria used to be segregated, and the integration of the public high schools occurred here.”
The mural, when completed, will show the entire timeline of this school from beginning to end. It will be the first piece of art in our school that will pack the entire history into one mural.
Featured photo by Pablo Cruz for Theogony
