ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 2, 1996 TAG: 9604020032
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Spring has come to Landsdowne's Resident Action Center.
Tulips and daisies shoot out of the linoleum floor. A kite flutters on the cinderblock wall.
On the sponge-painted blue backdrop, five figures pose confidently. A girl makes a peace sign. A boy stands whimsically askew - his arms spread as if he's holding the world.
Another boy flexes his biceps. A banner behind him reads: ``BE COOL. Play it Safe!''
In real life - and not on the mural - 10-year-old Ke'Shawn Kasey explains why he and four other kids from Landsdowne's housing development spent the past couple of weekends and time after school painting their own likenesses on the wall, along with messages about acting responsibly.
``We got together and wrote down ideas of all the things we could do to keep us outta trouble,'' Kasey says.
The list included: picking up trash in their neighborhood, helping the elderly, cutting the grass and planting flowers. They chose to do the mural project first because they had leftover paint from another project and ``because they wanted to give a message to the other kids in the neighborhood,'' explains Kathleen O'Malley, a Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge worker who helped guide the project.
There are no clouds on the mural, which starts out with sunshine on one wall and progressively darkens into a panoramic view of day-turned-night.
The moon, the sun, the kids - all project carefree, childlike smiles.
Roberta McCraw wishes the cheerful landscape were true-to-life outside the community's rec center. ``Bad things happen in this neighborhood,'' she says. ``We are trying to get a house and move.''
She says she fears for her 11-year-old son, who takes Ritalin for attention-deficit disorder and another drug for depression. The neighborhood kids tease him and call him dummy, ``and he doesn't take it very well. ... He got so out of control one time he put his fist through a wall.''
But his participation in the ``Sex or Not'' teen-pregnancy prevention project has helped to calm his temper. The group leader, Anthony Drakeford, ``tells him all the time, `You know who you are, you know what you are. Don't listen to the kids because as long as you know who you are, it doesn't matter what they think,''' the mother says.
McCraw's 13-year-old daughter, Stacie, holds the kite in the mural that reads: ``You must think before you act.'' Stacie says she doesn't enjoy art class at school, but loved painting the mural. ``At school, people don't come there and look at your work like here,'' she explains.
``She just lit up with it,'' her mother says of the project. ``Both of the kids - they were just so proud of it once they started painting. They had to call their grandmother up 375 miles away and tell her about it.''
The five kids make up the program's first teen-advisory panel and are graduates of ``Sex or Not'' classes. They've also participated in the city's town meeting on teen-pregnancy prevention and posed for the cover of a United Way brochure.
``These kids, they hang around after the group is over; they don't wanna leave,'' Drakeford says. ``Anything to keep them outta trouble. Because it's out there, believe me - just waiting for them.''
Ke'Shawn Kasey says the night he painted himself on the wall he was challenged to a fight. ``During the fight I was thinking about it,'' he says of his play-it-safe message. ``I wanted to stop, but I don't know, I couldn't.''
It may be spring inside the Landsdowne Resident Action Center, but outside the wind is still whipping and the grass is mostly brown.
Group leader Drakeford gives the kids fistsful of fliers to pass out as their next project: spreading the word about the new adult ``Sex or Not'' class. The flier promotes an upcoming rap session for parents, which will cover ``ways to talk to your children about the HARD STUFF ...'' The kids leave eagerly to disperse the message, a few on bikes, a few on foot.
Ten-year-old Michael Scaggs wears his jacket hood up as he delivers the first of his fliers, tucking it carefully inside a door handle. As he continues down the line of apartments, a woman opens her door, reads the flier - and then tosses it on the ground, where it flutters across the grass.
The flier dances across the brown lawn, blowing out of sight and further into the development, where hope is trying - desperately - to spring.
Beth Macy's column runs in Tuesday and Thursday Extra. She can be reached by phone at 981-3435, or by e-mail at extra@infi.net, or even the old-fashioned way at P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (Clockwise from bottom) Michael Scaggs, Stacie McCraw,by CNBKe'Shawn Kasey, La'Kisha Smith and Gerald McCraw with their mural in
the Landsdowne Resident Action Center. color