Madison High School students give playrooms at Rutgers’ Psychological Clinic a much-needed makeover

Madison High School psychologist Lydsi Silberman talks with junior Bailey Hurst, creator of the celestial-themed playroom mural.
Photo: Kristen Stephenson

'Play is the language of the children. When you engage with them – drawing or playing with dolls, puppets or a doctor’s kit – they express and work through feelings they can’t articulate. Our job is to help them on their terms.'
 
– Lyndsi Silberman

They arrived, clad in jeans and T-shirts, at the Psychology Building on Rutgers’ Busch Campus. To the beat of music from their portable speakers, they painted colorful murals projected onto the walls from sketches designed by their classmates. 

The 25 students from Madison High School, located in Morris County 20 miles from the university, were on a mission: to make the therapy rooms – where children in New Jersey’s foster care system cope with separation, loss, abuse and other trauma – more welcoming.

Within a few hours on a recent Friday morning, they transformed the playrooms of the Psychological Clinic, part of the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP), from drab to breathtaking. Each of the rooms became its own vibrant world – one depicting the galaxy; another, the ocean; and a third, the jungle.

“It’s like night and day, beyond what I expected,” says Robin Lang, director of Rutgers Foster Care Counseling Project, which for the past 25 years has provided assessment and therapy to children and families in the state’s foster care system.  “I’ve already gotten tremendous feedback from therapists and clients.” 

None of it, Lang says, would have been possible without Lyndsi.

Lyndsi is Lyndsi Silberman, who earned a doctorate in GSAPP’s Psy.D Program in School Psychology last year and provided individual and group therapy to foster care families as part of her training. She is also the school psychologist at Madison High School who sold the concept of brightening the rooms to students as a project for their high school community service day. 

Silberman, 27, never felt the rooms reflected the excellence of the program. “They were old and beat up, with toys strewn all over,” she says. “The rooms had a chaotic feel, when children in foster care need the opposite – order and an environment that is welcoming and warm."

Madison High School student Matt Driscoll puts the final touches on the wall mural in the jungle-themed playroom.
Photo: Kristen Stephenson

When she told the students about the clinic’s needs, they decided to hold a car wash fundraiser and raised $450 to refurbish the rooms with new toys, art supplies and storage bins. Students with an interest in art volunteered to design the murals, and so many signed up to paint that another crew was asked to stay behind to put together materials for the game-based therapy the clinic employs.

Sarah Coppola, a Madison High School junior, looked on as her classmates brought her inked jungle-themed drawing to life, filling in the lions and monkeys and the overgrown forests with green and brown hues.

She came up with the idea thinking about her own childhood. “I loved to look at books about animals in the jungle,” Coppola says. “I wanted to make them as cute and friendly as possible for the kids. I believe this will make them more comfortable.” 

Bailey Hurst, also a junior, wanted her sketch to reflect the vast beauty of outer space. She joined her classmates perfecting a red and white rocket ship as they captured the sun, moon and stars on a wall of newly painted rooms.

The fresh coats of paint – green, royal blue and light blue – were courtesy of Silberman and her husband, Joshua Solomon, who both attended Rutgers as undergraduates. (Silberman graduated with a triple major in psychology, political science and sociology.) They’d spent their Memorial Day weekend prepping the walls for the murals. 

Silberman shrugs away any kudos, saying the credit belongs to the students. ”They really got behind the project, “ she says, "and it was important for them too – they can now see the power of being able to make change.” 

Silberman’s relationship with the foster care counseling program, which GSAPP runs through a contract with the state Division of Child Protection and Permanency, isn’t over. She will continue to log time as a therapist in the playrooms – places, she says, where important things happen.

“Play is the language of the children,” Silberman says. “When you engage with them – drawing or playing with dolls, puppets or a doctor’s kit – they express and work through feelings they can’t articulate. Our job is to help them on their terms.”


For media inquiries, contact Carla Cantor at ucm.rutgers.edu or 848-932-0555.