By Kairi Asselstine
Photo by Kairi Asselstine
Have you heard? At Willow, students and teachers have become a part of the new bench project Ms. Brown has been working on for the high school campus. Students designed custom pieces of small glass, and the benches were filled with these specially made pieces and then set outside for everybody to use and admire as a piece to commemorate the students, teachers, and the school.
“8th-12th graders decorated tiles to contribute to the benches. I wanted to have them not be all uniform,” Ms. Brown said. “I wanted a variety in size and shape to symbolize the eclectic nature of the school but have cohesiveness with the school through the colors, so each tile is decorated with yellow and blue. Each tile is made individually by students with them being able to have the students’ names, class years, and designs, so they could find their piece.”
What was the inspiration for the benches?
“At the beginning of the year,” Brown continued, “Mr. Hill asked the staff to go to their advisory and think of a project that would be commemorative of the change in the school’s name. It’s also a special year with the eighth grade coming into the high school, and the first normal year since the pandemic, so it’s to commemorate each grade and the students.”
Brown took the question of how to do something special for this year to her own advisory. “I threw out the idea that what we do should be something symbolic, functional, and useful, so I made the idea to do benches, and my advisory chose that to give to the school.”
Although the benches haven’t been put outside for display yet, Ms. Brown said she hopes that they end up “in a circle out in the front to be a communal space or meeting spot for everyone,” so that hopefully they’re highly visible, and students can have fun finding the pieces that they made.
