Key Largo students paint Earth Day mural to raise manatee awareness

Fifteen Key Largo School students turned an after-school club into a public message for the Upper Keys, spending about 30 hours over months of Monday and Tuesday meetings to complete a second straight Earth Day mural, this time centered on manatees.

The Everglades Ambassadors, students in fifth grade and up who must write an essay to join the program, chose the animal as this year’s theme to spotlight a species that sits at the center of Keys conservation. Teacher Pam Caputo said the mural was meant to raise awareness about manatees, which depend on the seagrass beds and coastal habitat that shape life across Monroe County.

Caputo has taught at Key Largo School for 28 years and has lived in Key Largo since 1992. She has been recognized as both Environmental Teacher of the Year and Monroe County Teacher of the Year, and the mural project reflected the hands-on approach she has built into the club. On Earth Day, the Ambassadors hosted kindergarten through fourth grade students, helped them place handprints on the manatees, and later gave a presentation to Pre-K through fourth grade children about manatees and the Everglades.

The work did not happen in isolation. Deb Riolo, a retired graphic designer who taught graphic design at a vocational school for 36 years before retiring to the Keys, helped with the design, while Berry’s Paint of Key Largo donated the paint. The school said the mural was completed for the second year in a row, a sign that the project has become part of the school’s environmental identity rather than a one-off classroom assignment.

The mural also connects to the county’s larger conservation picture. Manatees feed on seagrass, and Florida has only seven species of seagrass. Mangrove systems matter just as much to the marine ecosystem around Key Largo and the Florida Keys, with an estimated 75% of game fish and 90% of commercial species in South Florida depending on them during at least part of their life cycles. For students painting manatees on a school wall, those habitat links are not abstract science. They are the backdrop to daily life in a place where environmental choices ripple far beyond campus.

The Everglades Ambassadors have already taken that message outside school grounds. On March 4, they hosted an outreach booth at Dolphin Plus focused on manatee conservation, shared boating-safety guidance and invited visitors to take a Manatee Pledge not to feed, touch or disturb manatees.