When you’re looking at one of Timm Etters’s airbrushed murals, you might first notice the brilliant color, the captivating dimension, or even just its sheer size.

“They are just striking. It’s like they reach out to you,” says Joan Mills, art teacher at Fry Elementary School in Naperville. “The colors are just so vibrant, and the contrast is just beautifully done. It’s obviously realism, but it also has that sense of otherworldliness to it.”

Etters, 49, of Volo, in Lake County, has painted hundreds of murals in local schools over the last three decades, but his influence extends beyond the walls of those gyms, hallways, and cafeterias. Through his artist-in-residence program, he has shared his inspiring story of overcoming obstacles and starting his own art business as a teen.

LIVING IN COLOR

Etters was in third grade when he discovered he was colorblind. An art teacher noticed he was struggling with colors and took him to the school nurse for a vision test. “I remember being pretty devastated,” Etters says. “I was like, ‘All I want to do is be an artist, and now I’m not going to be able to.’ ” The teacher suggested focusing on pencil drawing, and Etters took that advice to heart. “So from third grade all through high school, I drew and drew and drew. Every day,” he says.

At Cary-Grove High School, a budding love for hip-hop and graffiti inspired him to bring color back into his work. Then everything came to a standstill when, after a freak accident slipping in the bathtub, a doctor discovered he had stage 4 testicular cancer. To give himself something to look forward to during recovery, Etters started his own art business selling fellow students hand-drawn portraits and custom T-shirts painted with an airbrush he bought with money from his get-well cards.

Though the airbrush still remains Etters’s chosen tool, it was spray paint that inadvertently introduced him to school murals in 1985. After he was found responsible for marking a bridge with graffiti—an elaborate memorial to Vietnam veterans—the police officer, who was a vet himself, was so touched he gave Etters a creative punishment: 132 hours of community service painting a mural in his high school’s cafeteria.

SPEAKING TO STUDENTS

Etters offers an artist-in-residence program for schools in which he speaks about his life story in an assembly-style presentation that includes artwork from his grade school years. “It’s more directly relatable, rather than just showing them my [professional] work … and having them look it and say, ‘I could never do that,’ ” Etters says. “I kind of bring it down a few notches so they can really plug into it and say, ‘I can totally do this.’ ”

“The message he really gives is: Follow your passion and never give up—which is one we want our kids to hear and engage with,” says Tracy Dvorchak, a former principal at Prairie Elementary School who is currently at the helm of Naper Elementary School. Etters created a new logo for Prairie and completed an artist-in-residence program with the students prior to painting a mural in their gym five years ago.

Students also try out Etters’s airbrush tools. “They get to … paint their names up on a banner in different colors,” Etters says. “If there’s a school of 800 kids, then there’s 800 names in different colors and it looks like modern art … like a graffiti version of Jackson Pollock.”

Etters paints his murals while school is in session, rather than after hours or during school breaks. “We actually held PE right while he was doing it,” Dvorchak says. “He’s just over on the side, up on his scaffolding, and all the kids got to see him in action … and see the progress going along.” Because of the artist-in-residence program, Dvorchak says, “they had an understanding of how he did his work and they felt really connected to him.”

FORGING AHEAD

In recent years, health hurdles—depression, an injured tendon in his drawing arm, and spinal stenosis—have made the already physically demanding task of mural painting increasingly difficult for Etters. “There are days when it takes me two or three hours to get going in the morning … but I can work once I get going; it’s just harder,” he says. “It’s the kind of thing that’s never really been talked about, that people have often wondered about: ‘Why doesn’t Timm get here at 8 in the morning?’ or ‘Why doesn’t he have a regular schedule?’ … I hope it encourages other people that, you know, you’re going to have struggles, setbacks, and roadblocks.”

And his colorblindness? Etters has a number of strategies to overcome his vision limitations during mural painting. “One of those strategies is named Vicki,” he says, referring to his wife. “I can call her during the day at work and I’ll send her a picture and I’ll say, ‘What color is this?’ And she won’t say ‘red’ or ‘blue,’ she will say specific shades of red of blue that I will identify with.” Etters also uses technology to help, such as a Sherwin Williams color-matching app and Photoshop’s eyedropper tool. “There are times when I’ve built a relationship with kids [at the school I’m working at] where I can trust them. They know I’m colorblind and I’ll say, ‘Hey, in your best description, what color is this?’ And they’ll tell me or even help me mix it. It becomes a cool connection.”

Etters’s lifelong goal is to paint as many murals as Norman Rockwell painted Saturday Evening Post covers (see sidebar). “He’s one of my favorite painters,” Etters says. “He worked [there] for 43 years and painted, I think, 322 Post covers. … which meant, for me, that 323 would be where I could sit down and say, ‘I did it.’ ”

To date, Etters has completed 310 murals and has a six-month-long wait list for future projects. Somewhere around mural 307, he had an interaction with a student that he says he will never forget. “I had just finished a presentation at a school and, health-wise, I was really struggling,” he says. “This little girl comes up to me and … she says, ‘Mr. Etters, you only have 16 murals to go. You can do this!’ ” he says. “I was like, oh my gosh. I’m not going to let her down.”

With its endless hours of mind-numbing timed drills and banal essays, standardized testing was, once upon a time, exclusively the bane of the downtrodden No. 2 pencil-toting student. “Suck it up, kid,” the adults would say, proudly bearing the hard-earned Iowa Basics scars of their own childhoods.

But in 2015, when the state of Illinois rolled out the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test as the new state assessment and accountability measure for Illinois students in grades 3 through 8, standardized testing suddenly became a headache for everyone—from teachers to administrators to parents as well. And, all mathematical evidence to the contrary, “PARCC” became a four-letter word.

The test was overly complicated. It took too much time away from classroom instruction. The results were arbitrary and/or unreliable, and they took far too long to arrive.

To dive into the deep well of discontent that has been the PARCC experience over these past three-plus years is to plumb a seemingly bottomless pit of consternation and handwringing from almost every corner of the public education arena. But large-scale educational efforts—particularly those involving assessment and accountability—tend to foster this kind of heated debate and rhetoric; as long as the data is accurate and actionable, the common wisdom goes, the suffering will have certainly been worth all the pain.

Yet three, going on four, years later—and with what should be a celebratory, relevant, and rock-solid dataset in the books—the testing tussle has yet to subside. If anything, the calls for change have only intensified, and the state is indeed reconsidering how PARCC is administered and how its results are interpreted. Here, then, at something of a crossroads for the test (at presstime, plans for the spring 2019 version of the test were very much up in the air), two local administrators weigh in on a few standardized questions related to PARCC and its future in their districts and schools.

How would you characterize the general attitude of teachers and parents surrounding PARCC in your district or school?

If they’re not exactly rolling out the balloons and brass bands, it seems that most of these important local constituencies have at least accepted the inevitability of PARCC, and have made a genuine effort to make the most of it.

“I think there’s been a learning curve for everyone—from the students who take the test to the staff members who manage it—but the sentiment here is really positive,” says Patrick Nolten, the assistant superintendent for assessment and accountability in Naperville Community Unit School District 203 (where PARCC scores are among the highest in the area; see sidebar). “I know there are some districts where they’re bemoaning the state of PARCC and the testing process, but this district is behind it, and I really think appreciates the opportunity to show the amazing work our teachers do every day and the learning our students demonstrate.”

But while most people have indeed adjusted to PARCC as a mandate, it often fails to generate much enthusiasm in the bigger picture as a key educational tool.

“Teachers and families understand that PARCC is required,” says Arin Carter, director of the John C. Dunham STEM Partnership School, which draws students in grades 3 through 8 from the districts of Batavia (101), East Aurora (131), Indian Prairie (204), and West Aurora (129). “But our teachers go out of their way to make sure that our students are learning based on the standards—not based on PARCC.”

How has PARCC impacted curriculum changes in your district/school over the past three years?

This is one of the big ideas behind PARCC: its ability to guide administrators toward data-supported changes to help students learn better or more efficiently. It’s an idea that has perhaps not seen as much traction as hoped for over the past three years, but in District 203, at least, Nolten sees definite progress.

“Although PARCC is only a one-time-a-year summary measure, we really try to use it to look at whose needs we’re meeting instructionally, and whose needs we may need to take additional steps or measures toward meeting as a district,” he says. “There’s a targeted focus on achievement gap reduction to really meet the needs of all students. So all of our schools incorporate into their school improvement planning a metric from the PARCC results to see if we’re seeing progress and growth in terms of meeting those students’ needs.”

Has PARCC provided a largely accurate snapshot of student performance?

Nolten says that kids in his district who meet or exceed standards as they transition from grade level to grade level taking PARCC assessments are generally those in the best position to be poised for college and career readiness. Test scores, of course, are not the only measure of success, and Carter believes it’s important to keep that in mind when assessing the whole student.   

“Our curriculum goes well beyond the skills that are assessed on PARCC,” she explains. “While we teach the standards that are required, the integrated way in which students are taught at our school allows them to make connections among the content areas that I’m not confident PARCC assesses. Further, there are many other skills that are extremely important today—such as interpersonal skills, collaboration, and design process understanding—that are not measured at all.”

What changes would you like to see in the design or administration of PARCC?

Changes are certainly coming, but for now, no one is exactly sure what form those changes will take. If the thoughts of many teachers and administrators figure into the next version of the now 12-hour test, however, one word will certainly define the new PARCC: shorter.

“My biggest concern is the amount of time that is spent on PARCC administration,” Carter says, echoing comments she’s heard time and again from teachers and parents alike (not to mention students, of course). “There’s just a lot of time that should be spent on instruction that is instead spent administering a test.”

“The criticism I think almost everybody shares has to do with the length of time,” Nolten agrees. “In terms of a wish list, a shorter test that takes less time instructionally would be great. We’d also like more diagnostic-like information so we can get more student-level analysis about skill development—less global or general, and more specific around exactly some of the skills that we need to focus on for growth at the student level.”

The question that will need to be answered by the state, then, is how to address all of these concerns while still delivering a standardized test that not only assesses student proficiency, but also allows for continuity of comparison with the data that has been compiled over the past three years.

That test is to come. But for now, pencils down.