Seventh-graders from Collegedale Academy gather in front of the Collegedale Post Office with a map of the United States they created from stamps. / Photo from Angi HowellA class project at Collegedale Academy near the end of the school year covered a lot of ground as curriculum goes - geography, math, art, civics. And every lesson - U.S. states, proportional scale, a framed creation, community service - stemmed from stamps.
"Each year in math, our students are assigned a math project to create a replica of an object that is scaled up or down in accurate proportional scale," says Selena Trott, who teaches seventh-grade math at the school, formerly Collegedale Adventist Middle School. "We worked on this project as a group to give an example to that assignment."
Trott says about 60 students from three seventh-grade classes worked on the project: a framed model of a United States map with each state differentiated by used postage stamps. The students presented the model to the Collegedale Post Office.
The young philatelists - to use a new vocabulary word - trimmed hundreds of donated stamps and then glued them to mat board cut to the shape of each state. Joe La Com, an assistant professor in Southern Adventist University's School of Visual Art and Design, contributed to the community project by laser-cutting the mat board into the states' 50 individual shapes.
"In the past, Selena has cut them out by hand," says La Com. The mat board is "not terribly thick, maybe an eighth of an inch, but doing that by hand, you'd have a pretty sore hand after a couple of days. We could do it on the laser cutter in an hour or less."
The used postage stamps were donated by congregants of Collegedale Church of Seventh-day Adventists and school parents. "We were blessed to have various church members save stamps for us," says Trott.
So many, they lost count. But having options sometimes presented the chance to match stamps with an item of interest for each state, such as apples for Washington, various snowflakes for New England states and shells for Hawaii.
Tennessee is represented by a row of three and a half stamps commemorating the total solar eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017.
"It was close between that and Elvis stamps," says Trott, "but we didn't have enough of those."
As stamps came in, they were stored by theme in fishing tackle boxes. Once needed, they were cut to fit the parameters of each state - from sprawling Alaska to tiny Rhode Island.
"The biggest issue with the smallest states is not losing them, so we kept them and their corresponding stamps in baggies until we put the map back together," Trott says.
Detail of Southern states from the larger map created by Collegedale Academy seventh-graders. / Photo from Angi HowellThe states were placed in their proper location with a yarn outline defining each border. Each state has one type of stamp covering it. The oceans forming the background are filled with a red, white and blue USA stamp.
"We painstakingly sorted them, chose a consistent stamp design to cover the individual states, trimmed them to fit and neatly attached them to cover each state," seventh-grader Bryn Dickinson says of the process.
Once everything was in place, the artwork was shellacked and framed, ready to present.
Collegedale Postmaster Justin Taylor accepted the gift, which he believes is the first of its kind in Tennessee. He says the 5- by 3.5-foot artwork will soon occupy a place of prominence in the lobby, "where customers will come in every day and have access to it."
The delay between donation and display is simply the need for a fresh coat of paint. The stamp map will replace a larger bulletin board in the lobby, but removing it revealed a different color paint on the wall behind it.
Trott already has enough stamps for another project, including enough pine cone stamps to do Maine, her home state. An acquaintance from church passed along "a huge bag of stamps that she'd been saving for 10 years," says Trott. "That was huge."
Trott says she intends to continue building these stamp-filled replicas, "both as an educational opportunity and as a contribution to our community. We have several area post offices we'd like to share this with, and we'll branch further outside of our local community as time goes on."
Angi Howell, director of marketing and recruiting for Collegedale Academy, says Trott has left this legacy in communities where she's previously taught. Similar pieces have been hanging in the Williston, Vermont, and South Lancaster, Massachusetts, post offices for 20 and 15 years, respectively.
"That's what I hope for this one," says Taylor.
Contact Lisa Denton at ldenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6281.
In front, Collegedale postmaster Justin Taylor, left, and Collegedale Academy teacher Selena Trott hold the U.S. map created from postage stamps. About 60 seventh-graders participated in the class project. / Photo from Angi Howell