By Mike Finney

DOVER — It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words.

However, the old photos that students from Polytech High School’s broadcast media class brought back to life for 15 residents of Dover Place Memory Care & Senior Living Community turned out to be worth a thousand cherished memories.

Kyla Gleockler, life enrichment coordinator for Dover Place, said the students’ meticulous work put an abundance of smiles on members’ faces.

“They were so touched by it,” she said. “A lot of them didn’t realize it because we collected the pictures in December, and it took the students about a month-and-a-half or so to get the pictures all done and then to get them printed out.

“The residents were just taken aback. It was emotional for the residents to see the before and the after and the 8-by-10s. The students were emotional, too, when they saw the pictures in the end after all their hard work.”

The 14 sophomores who participated in the project captured specific details from each image to enhance each resident’s special remembrances.

Jason Gleockler, Kyla’s husband, teaches the broadcast media class and got the idea when he saw a student colorizing an old black-and-white photo.

“This sophomore class is a fantastic class,” he said. “They actually are the first in our history that we’ve been offering certifications, and the entire class got certified in Photoshop.”

When he saw the student coloring the shot, he said, “It just kind of hit me when I saw the student doing this with how good the results were."

That’s when he and his wife came up with the concept of his students bringing back memories for the residents of Dover Place.

“It was a combination of using artificial intelligence to auto-enhance and colorize the photos, and that did some of the heavy lifting, and then, the students were able to customize the colors and tweak them, so they matched what the residents remembered,” Mr. Gleockler said.

“Things such as the color of their dress or the color of their lipstick, their hair or even their eyes, ... (they) tweaked that and changed that so that it would be accurate.”

The resulting reproductions brought smiles — and maybe even some tears — to both the students and the residents.

“Both generations felt the meaningful connection to the photos and this project,” Ms. Gleockler said.

Of the students, her husband said, “They were extremely excited and touched to be able to work on something like that. They overall were just excited, enthusiastic and touched.”

The photos were displayed at Dover Place during February, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“We put out a big display table, too, for all of the residents and families and staff to see the before-and-after of all those pictures, and we had that out for about a month,” Ms. Gleockler said.

“We even had residents who were able to tell their families about it, and the families talked to Polytech about it and how much they appreciated it and how moving it was.”

Unfortunately, the Polytech students were unable to deliver the refurbished photos in person because of COVID-19 restrictions.

“That was certainly a little bit of a letdown, but we were able to get and see photos and videos of the residents receiving their photos or holding their photos, which was nice and touching,” Mr. Gleockler said.