The Answer Sheet - In Arizona, a school mural controversy: In Arizona, an elementary school principal is said to have ordered that the faces of some children depicted in a giant mural be lightened after receiving complaints about the ethnicity of the kids.The Arizona Republic reports that Jeff Lane, the principal at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, said he sent artists out only to fix shading.
But R.E. Wall, the leader of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Projects, said he was ordered to lighten the skin tone on the 'Go on Green' mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley and was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation.
It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure. Faces in the mural -- the fourth of community murals drawn by a group of artists known as the “Mural Mice” -- were drawn from photos of kids enrolled at the K-5 school, located about two hours north of Phoenix.
