The Business and Engineering hallway at Arrowhead’s North Campus has recently acquired banners indicating the names of classes located in the hall. These banners include “Robotics,” “Design,” “Engineering,” and others. Previous to being at North Campus, they were located in the Design, Manufacturing, and Engineering hallway at South Campus.

“When we had these banners down here, it brightened it up a little bit, they were high up so we didn’t have to worry about kids jumping up and ripping them down. So it gave the hallway a little bit of life. We moved them up to North Campus because this hallway is already beautiful in terms of what’s going on. So we thought that maybe it would provide a little too much, maybe be a little too distracting,” says Tom Whelan, Technology and Engineering teacher and Department Coordinator.

The Design, Engineering, and Manufacturing extension is planning to add more to their South Campus hallway. According to Whelan, life-sized student pictures using assorted machines will be put on the walls. The banners were too much of an addition, and caused the hallway to look cluttered.

“I had had the banners out in this hallway [South Campus’ Design, Engineering, and Manufacturing Center] and what it did was allowed students to find out what went on in these classrooms because when you’re walking, even from the cafeteria, you’re looking down a hallway and you have no idea what’s down that hallway,” says Whelan.

The idea was to move the banners in order to tell the students what was going on in the Business and Manufacturing hallway at North Campus, so students would become interested in taking those classes.

The money for the banners came from the budget for the center at South.

Whelan says, “When it comes to who payed for them, we did out of our budget. I do not remember how much they cost, but I’m guessing around $300 for all of them.

“I think why other people [or departments] do not [purchase banners is] because they’re either not sure how to do it or they’re not sure why to do it.”

Whelan says the reason for other hallways not having banners is because he initially purchased them specifically for one area.

Research went into buying these banners. Whelan says he had to find a company to buy them from, get permission to put them in the hallway, purchase them from the budget, and get people at the school to hang them.

“We’ve been doing a lot of research on how to better Manufacturing [classes] and how to bring Manufacturing into the 21st century. For us even to get the new addition, the remodeling we have in this space, is because we fought for it for a lot of years and we’ve done our research to find out who’s doing what we’re doing,

“I just thought, from my perspective in our tech ed group, that it would really help benefit our program by making it look good, making it look a little more attractive and make people actually want to come down here,” says Whelan.