Sullivan student awarded Best of Show for Fair theme art

The San Diego County Fair’s Student Showcase includes fine art, and one of the categories is Fair Theme. This year’s theme was “Oz-some” and commemorated the 80th anniversary of the “Wizard of Oz” movie, and the Best of Show for students in seventh or eighth grade was given to Sullivan Middle School student Jimena Pacheco.

Pacheco drew a picture she called “Tornado” which features a house on top of a tornado. The drawing also includes a red shoe, a red bow, a yellow hat, an oil can and dirt on the ground.

“I love everything that she does, so I was very excited her piece won,” Sullivan art teacher Melissa Ledri said.

Pacheco, who completed eighth grade this year, was a transfer student and joined Ledri’s Advanced Art class for the second semester of the 2018-2019 school year. Pacheco had taken art classes before transferring to Sullivan.

“She did what she loved and something that she was inspired by,” Ledri said.

Ledri’s Advanced Art class had 23 students for 2018-2019.

“It’s a smaller class, which is great. I love that size,” she said.

During the 2018-2019 school year Ledri taught Advanced Art, Beginning Art and 3D Design and Printmaking, which was combined with Yearbook. She also taught sixth-grade language arts and sixth-grade social studies.

Ledri had been Sullivan Middle School’s Yearbook teacher in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. Just before the beginning of the school year, the 2017-2018 Yearbook teacher had been reassigned to math and science.

That created the potential loss of a yearbook class.

“It was going to be a club,” Ledri said.

There was one other option to preserve a Yearbook class.

“This year we had to combine it with another elective,” Ledri said.

The yearbook was incorporated into the 3-D Design and Printmaking class.

“I volunteered to do what I did,” Ledri said. “It wasn’t the best fix, but it was a fix for the master schedule. It was just a really hard decision.”

All of Ledri’s students, including the ones in the combined Yearbook and 3D Design and Printmaking class, entered artwork at the San Diego County Fair. The sixth-graders were entered in the Creative Youth competition for grades K-6. The seventh-grade and eighth-grade students had their work shown in the Student Showcase. Ledri had 32 entrants in the Creative Youth exhibit and 53 students who submitted pieces for the Student Showcase.

“It’s an assignment that I gave them,” Ledri said.

Sullivan actually had 86 entries in the Student Showcase – the 2018-2019 yearbook was also submitted. Other than the Best of Show award place ribbons are awarded based on points rather than head-to-head competition. The yearbook received a first-place ribbon.

The students began their county fair projects following the end of spring break.

“They had about five weeks to work on it,” Ledri said.

Ledri showed her class the “Wizard of Oz” movie.

“They had this frame of reference,” she said. “A majority of kids had not seen that movie, so it was kind of a cultural lesson as well.”

Several of the students chose the tornado as the basis for their artwork.

“It’s always interesting to see what they look at and who gets Best of Show,” Ledri said.