One of my favorite things about living in a town this small is how often our kids end up right at the center of it. Every summer the Museum of the Everglades hands its walls over to them, and I look forward to it every single year.

This year’s exhibit is called American Spirit, American Dream, and it opens June 23 and runs through October 3.

A Local Tradition

Here’s how it works. Every year the museum partners with our school to build an exhibit around something that makes this community special. Everglades City School is one of the last two K-12 public schools in Florida still on a single campus. You can feel that closeness in the work. The kids turn in artwork, photos, videos, written stories, and interviews. The museum pulls it all together for visitors from all over the world to see.

There’s a contest that goes along with it, too, with cash prizes and categories open to students of every age. It gives our kids a reason to really dig in, and it gives the rest of us a reason to show up and see what they came up with.

This Year’s Theme

For 2026, the students took on America 250, the country’s 250th birthday. The question they were asked is a big one. What does the American Spirit mean to you, and how does your own life, along with the lives of your family and friends, connect you to a two-and-a-half-century tradition of pursuing the American Dream?

I love to see what their perspective is and how they demonstrate that in their work. That’s a point of view you won’t find anywhere else.

A Changing of the Walls

This exhibit takes over from Growing Obsession, the museum’s beautiful look at our local orchids, which closes June 20. If you’ve been meaning to catch the orchids, you’ve still got a little time. After that, the walls belong to our students.

Come by this summer and see what they made.

You may also be interested in Drawn Together Art Contest Open to Local Students in May or Spotlight: Friends of the Museum of the Everglades.