The first Ecole West Park School fundraising Student Art Show is being hailed a big success. Organized by the Parent Advisory Council, it took place Thursday night at Altona's Community Exchange and featured live music, art auctions and raffles. Over $2,500 was raised during the evening.
Chair Sandy Hutchison says the vision was to have students be directly involved in as many ways as possible.
"There's a lot of ways for kids to be seen and to contribute to our community," he shared. "We were looking for something new, and a little bit different. The arts, in general, is something that's a little bit harder to get out, as opposed to the things that happen on a field or on the ice surface. It's not only the talented musicians and artists that contributed tonight, there are over 40 volunteer students that showed up to help with serving appetizers, with the raffle sales and admission sales. They're going to be helping clean up at the end of the night, all hands on deck. It's been a great, rewarding experience."
A student forward event
Two of those students, both in Grade 6, were Savannah and Ain. Savannah contributed two acrylic paintings to the art auction.
"One was under the sea, it was like the ocean and fish," she said. "The other one was a mountain and a Moon."
She has been painting for a couple years, and really enjoys it.
"It's really fun and you can be really artistic with it," said Savannah. "You can just do whatever you want, there's no limits."
Ain, a violin player, entertained the crowd prior to the official start of the program in the space where most of the art was set up on display.
"I wanted to do fiddle and some Disney songs and some famous movie songs," she said while reflecting on why she likes to fiddle. "When you learn it, it goes really fast, and I like fast, up-beat songs."
A surprise awaited students Friday morning
The 2024-25 Ecole West Park School Advisory Council has set a goal of fundraising $5,000 in order to subsidize the student yearbook, install a GaGa Ball pit on the playground, and purchase some new classroom activities and games. Thursday's Art Show went a long way in helping with that goal.
"This is the first annual West Park Art Show, and we had no idea whether five people were going to show up or 500," said Hutchison. "We are so grateful to the community for coming out and supporting these young students as they put in the the work to be rewarded."
And that reward came a lot sooner than some of the students thought it would. The GaGa Ball Pit was built and ready Friday morning on the school's playground.
You can listen to our conversation with Sandy Hutchison, Savannah and Ain, below.