Brooklyn students’ diversity mural that was torn down last year is repainted on side of school

A school mural designed by Brooklyn fifth-graders to celebrate diversity, then promptly torn down by administrators who objected to its content, has gotten a second life — painted on the outside of the school.

A massive replica of the student mural, which depicts Black girls wearing crowns alongside messages like “Black Trans Lives Matter” and a quote from feminist author Audre Lorde, is near completion at Public School 295 in Park Slope, after a year-long effort to restore it.

“It’s been a long, difficult, bureaucratic journey, but it’s really magical,” PS 295 parent Elton Ueoka Dodson, told the Daily News. “It’s a pretty profound symbolic victory when it’s standing 30 feet by 60 feet on an outside wall.”

Fury over the mural’s removal exploded when The News broke the story last August of the decision by then-Principal Lisa Pagano, Frank Giordano, the principal of the neighboring middle school and district Superintendent Anita Skop to remove the mural just days after it was finished.

Text messages and accounts from staffers showed the administrators were concerned that the messages were not “welcoming” enough and too divisive.

An Education Department investigation later found that both Pagano and Giordano violated the agency’s anti-discrimination rules. Pagano left her position at the end of last school year, and Skop was not rehired as district superintendent. Giordano remains principal at New Voices middle school, which shares a building with PS 295.

Dodson, who started a nonprofit called “Mural Justice Project” in the wake of the artwork’s removal, said Skop apologized for her role in the mural’s destruction and helped the group secure $25,000 in city funding that paid for the re-creation.

The repainted version contains all of the details from the original, which was designed by six fifth-grade students with the help of the arts education nonprofit Groundswell. But instead of hanging inside the school cafeteria, the mural now faces outward.

“We want our students to know: If your voices are shamed or oppressed, your community will be there to amplify you a hundredfold,” Dodson said. “If your message is defaced, it will be restored larger and louder than ever before.”