Can 10-years-olds solve city’s graffiti woes?
A group of energized 10-year-olds have pitched their ideas on how St. Catharines should deal with downtown graffiti.
In an email to The St. Catharines Standard and copied to Mayor Walter Sendzik, 22 fifth-graders offer their solutions, including what the city should do with thousands of unused dollars in its graffiti-removal assistance fund.
“It’s actually a really, really big problem,” said Linnea Bartell, one of the students in Madame Lisi’s Dalewood French Immersion Public School class who helped brainstorm ideas to tackle city’s graffiti problems.
Students were reacting to news that the downtown has recently been hit with a rash of graffiti. While the St. Catharines Downtown Association has almost run out of money for cleanup, the city has only spent $1,000 of its $15,000 removal fund.
The students wrote in their letter the fund offered by the city is helpful, but property owners aren’t accessing it because they must cover the costs of cleanup upfront. The owners get reimbursed for half the cost so they can remove it themselves for less money.
The Grade 5 students have suggested three ways the city could use the extra, unused money, including contacting a company to go around and clean up the graffiti.
They also thought the city could reach out to businesses or properties hit by vandals, instead of waiting for the owners to contact the city. As well, they suggested when a new business opens in a graffiti-heavy area, they could be given a coupon for free removal of graffiti.
Teacher Jen Lisi said the class has been looking at different problems in the community, province or country in its social studies unit and identifying what level of government is responsible for finding solutions or funding those solutions.
News articles about the city’s graffiti caught their attention.
“They really thought about the impact it had on a lot of people,” she said. “It really showed me they are quite an empathetic group. They’re not business owners, they’re not property owners but when they were reading the article they put themselves in somebody else’s shoes and really took that on and how would they feel if it happened to them.”
Other ideas from the kids included adding more security cameras and lights in graffiti-prone areas, requiring people to have a licence or show ID when buying spray paint, supervising people with spray paint, putting tracking devices on cans, giving cash rewards for witnesses and having harsher punishments for people who are caught.