Over six months time, a group of Blue Springs High School students were able to tell 50 years of history about their building and put it out there for the entire community to see.
The "Back Where You Belong” visual storytelling was a client-connected project between students in Kelly Fowler’s Entrepreneurship Class and JE Dunn Construction, who are currently working on the new freshman addition at BSHS.
"Back Where You Belong” is a series of more than 30 informational windscreens displayed on the fence surrounding the current construction project.
Through an informational timeline, visitors can enjoy the history of Blue Springs High School with the backdrop of its future addition.
"This was a fantastic project,” Fowler said, who has been at BSHS for 19 years. “JE Dunn approached us with an idea for a project and I knew that we had a magical class of seniors that could make it happen.”
Make what happen, the class didn’t know initially, but through breaking into various groups – storytelling, research, and design – the plan began to take shape.
Jordon Fields was one of those seniors and the work he did on the project weeks prior to graduating were some of his most memorable high school experiences.
I would say something I learned from this project was working as a team within a team,” he said. “It was something I never had to do before in school. I was part of the storytelling group, but we had no story to tell without the research group and we couldn’t tell it without a design.
"We came up with “Back Where You Belong,” because the freshman class was finally coming back to our school, and they are going to join us."
The research team poured through old BSHS yearbooks to find the history, the storytelling group wrote the informative script, and the design team put them into finished form.
Then the seniors graduated.
The work was picked up by Fowler and incoming junior designer Cadie Copeland, who took all the previous information and began putting the designs into print.
“We wanted to tell a story of this campus on these banners from when it started to what’s going to happen in the future,” Fowler said. “Now came the time to get them finished and printed.”
Copeland took the previous information and ran with it – making the final designs come to fruition.
“This was a great opportunity for me as an aspiring graphic designer,” Copeland said. “I had the opportunity to work with a real client with restrictions. It felt like a real world experience and made me decide to pursue my career. I loved being able to come to class and work on my project every day and to then see it on display around the school was a dream come true.
JE Dunn Project Manager Eric Neill said the finished project was one to be proud of, as are the students who did all the groundwork.
“It is so much fun to interact with students and see their passion for their future,” he said. “When you go into a classroom and understand the impact you are having, it is invigorating.”