Sculpture by St. Charles special needs students on display at Lauren Underwood's office

You can't walk into U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood's West Chicago office without noticing the "Mr. Ms. fit" statue standing front and center.

The 6-foot creation of the kindergarten through 12th-grade special education students at Mades-Johnstone Center in St. Charles landed at Underwood's office after previous stops at the St. Charles Veterans Center and St. Charles Public Library.

And it deserves to make the rounds, which it will continue to do this summer. The statue, made up of puzzle pieces and delivering various messages about overcoming bullying, depression and peer pressure, while also sharing uplifting advice from Martin Luther King, earned a first place finish in the annual Chicago Area Alternative Education League art show in late March.

"The piece is so powerful and so meaningful," said Mades-Johnstone art teacher Paul Scanlan, who has helped shape the art portion of the New Directions program at Mades-Johnstone for the past eight years.

"Every single kid at the school, more than 60 of them, put their hands on this project, and it took four-and-a-half months to complete," Scanlan said.

The kindergarten students created a wallpaper backdrop for the statue that delivers even more messages, and Scanlan sums up the entire project as something that is "really cool" and a piece of art in which everyone can find something to relate.

Mades-Johnstone students have made a name for themselves at the League's art show the past seven years, earning numerous first place awards for their work.

"We are regulars there," Scanlan said of the show at Robert Morris College in Des Plaines. "We have a pretty good reputation and it is neat when other art teachers walk up and ask what we are working on this year."

The art program renaissance at Mades-Johnstone is not lost upon Marianne Fidishin, the executive director the past two years for the Mid-Valley Special Education Cooperative, which shares the building at 1304 Ronzheimer Ave. with Mades-Johnstone.

"Paul has been the driving force behind all of these wonderful things that are happening here at Mades-Johnstone," Fidishin said. "The kids are involved and enthusiastic, and Mr. Scanlan's skill, ability and enthusiasm is mind-boggling.

"He has a way of tapping into what is important to the students and allowing them to flourish and communicate through activity."

When Scanlan explains his success in working with students facing developmental challenges, it reads like a playbook that would work for any teacher in any setting. But it's important to remember there was no music or arts program at Mades-Johnstone prior to his arrival.

"I really like to get to know the kids, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what they really like to do," Scanlan said. "I let them do things that matter to them."

Perfection lauded:

This happens on occasion, and it is amazing each time. Geneva High School student Reese Gosain has received plenty of attention - and deservedly so - for racking up perfect scores on his ACT and SAT tests.

Another student at Geneva High School, Colton Benjamin, also aced his ACT just for good measure.

How does a student pull this off? I'm not the one to ask. I can't remember my scores, of course, but the tests came and went without as much as a "good job" comment from anyone. So, I'm guessing I was a middle-of-the-pack finisher on those intelligence tests that gauge your potential college skills.

In any case, here's my suggestion for Reese or Colton: Go topple that Naperville North kid in "Jeopardy."

Just gathering dust:

On my trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico last week, I discovered you can likely travel to most any city and find a saga similar to Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles.

This one was Winrock Town Center, a decades-old shopping mall area that caught my eye in Albuquerque because it looked like much of it had been torn down. So developers certainly had other intentions, right?

My sister said when the traditional mall started to falter, developers came in with plans for - this might sound familiar - an open-air community center with outdoor retail, offices and maybe condos.

Then the recession hit and it left all sorts of cracks in the armor that haven't been filled.

I went online to get more info about Winrock and saw the distressing sentence we've become used to here as well: "Over the following years, there were numerous false starts" in trying to get the project moving along.

So, stuff happens. Retail shopping areas have to reinvent themselves to lure people in with mobile devices and interact with customers digitally in the store and in their homes.

That doesn't mean the ideas for Winrock or Charlestowne were way off base. They actually may have been good ideas to get things jump-started.

But any person in any business who has good ideas, but never acts on them, essentially ends up with ideas gathering dust. For the mall plans, those simply gather construction dust.

Is it just me?

At first, I was thinking a few of these products I bought simply weren't that good. Thus, they broke fairly quickly.

But it's pretty much been a lifelong pattern, so I will ask this question to determine if anyone else encounters it.

Why is it that nearly every umbrella or flashlight I have purchased doesn't seem to work more than a year or so without having all sorts of issues?

A moving experience:

The Memorial Day weekend reminded me I wanted to thank the Batavia Veterans of Foreign Wars Post members for bringing the Vietnam Moving Wall tribute to the post earlier this month.

I had never seen it before, and it delivers a blow to your senses when seeing how many young people we lost in that conflict.

After seeing the wall, it surely had its desired effect on me. In order to wrap my mind around the thought that one of the names on the wall belonged to 15-year-old Daniel Bullock, the youngest U.S. serviceman killed in Vietnam, I had to learn more about this young boy.

As I suspected, the nation's media reported that this African American youth from North Carolina doctored his birth certificate when he was 14 in order to get into the Marines.

He was born in December of 1953 and died on June 7, 1969 at An Hoa Combat Base.

dheun@sbcglobal.net