Painters Heed the Wall of the Wild

A tiger stares out at passersby, and monkeys swing from a tree. Nearby in the rain forest foliage are three children, who are naming the animals with sign language.

The animals and children are pictured in a mural that now graces a wall at Taft Elementary School in Santa Ana, home to a special program for deaf and hearing-impaired students from central and southern Orange County.

The mural was painted to honor one of Taft’s longtime instructional assistants, Jane Miller, who died of cancer last year.

Miller’s friends and family members donated the $2,700 necessary for the mural, and another $600 to purchase toys for deaf and hearing-impaired preschoolers at Taft.

“She would have loved to have seen this,” Miller’s husband, Bruce Miller, said as he visited the school. “In fact, she’s probably looking down smiling right now.”

In addition to honoring Miller, the mural will act as a teaching tool.

Of the approximately 1,020 students enrolled at Taft, about 120 are in the deaf and hard-of-hearing program, said Steven T. Longacre, the program’s principal.

Program teacher Carol Lambert said the mural can be used to show children how to form sentences about animals and their attributes.

“It’s a learning wall,” she said.

Last week, students in the deaf and hard-of-hearing program were busy learning from the mural and painting it as they picked up brushes and filled in blank spots with the help of a professional artist.

Student Lizeth Segovia thought the best part of the mural was the child signing the word “tiger”--which is done by moving the hands across the cheeks to symbolize whiskers.

Lizeth, 10, also pointed to the tiger cubs.

“I like the babies,” she said. “They’re cute.”

“The kids enjoy seeing it in progress,” Seal Beach artist Jacque Fabritz said as she supervised the finishing touches, “and the fact that people are signing.”