Parkway South Art Students Need Your Votes

It is with great elation that I share an enormous accomplishment and opportunity for the art students.

VANS Shoe Company holds a yearly shoe creation competition. This past February, Eric Ludlow (Visual Arts Team Leader at Parkway South) and I, Carrie Finnestead (Art Instructor,) presented the project to our Design Arts classes as well as my painting 1 class. I expressed to the students that we needed to come up with the most creative, well-crafted shoes possible. The students agreed that we needed to have an over-arching theme of ST. LOUIS and the ARCH on every shoe. After filtering through over 260 designs, I created a production team of our most talented seniors, many of whom have won numerous awards at art shows this year.

VANS sent out four pairs of shoes to each of the 1,000 participating schools across the country. I wanted to create the closest experience to "real world" design, selection and production as possible for the students. I led the students in design meetings where we worked on the shoes after school and on weekends for the last three weeks. Last Friday the 13^th, we submitted the images of the final shoes to the VANS Company.

This past Thursday the 20th at 11pm, we found out from VANS that, Parkway South High has made it to the Semi-finals; We are in the top ten schools  in the Southeast region and the only semi-finalist from Missouri. This is a tremendous accomplishment. Again, we are the ONLY school in Missouri to achieve this status.

How can you help Parkway South students advance to become one of the five schools in the country to compete for the National VANS title?  

VOTE NOW; the internet votes can be cast now until May 3rd at 10:59:59 pm will count. Due to security issues last year, VANS has put in place a rule of "one vote per IP address." VOTE using home computer, smart phone or with any device that registers a different ip address. There is no log in to vote this year resulting in a less than 30 second process to register your vote. Parkway South appreciates your support!

With your help, we will win the internet vote and advance to the Top Five Schools. Parkway South’s design team, production team and at least two adults will travel to Los Angeles at the end of May to compete in the National competition for a $50,000 award to fund further projects, supplies, internships, guest artists and scholarships in the wining school’s art department.

The students are ecstatic about their current status as semi-finalists and the possibility, with your vote, to advance further. VOTE! Spread the word online and in person; join our grassroots marketing efforts to promote and recognize the amazing artistic talent of Missouri students as they feature the great city of St. Louis in their original VANS art work!

The website to vote is: www.vans.com/customculture/vote/