Congrats to students in billboard contest

Through the Clovis Municipal Schools Instruction Department, staff works through leadership teams that incorporate communications, information dissemination, projects and other activities. Leadership teams made up of a representative from each site come together on a regular basis to work in their focus area, including literacy, numeracy, technology and character. This has proven to be a great way to build cohesiveness and consistency across the district, achieving the goal of involving teachers and school sites in the decision-making process.

The Character Leadership team has continued implementing the Josephson Institute's Character Counts! program (https://charactercounts.org/home/index.html) and its six pillars of character development: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship. This national program has been adopted by many states for many years — including New Mexico — and is subsequently rolled out to districts.

The last couple of years the Character Leadership team has, among other activities, taken on large district-wide projects to benefit a wide range of students and staff. This year's undertaking was a community billboard contest to illustrate the six pillars of character.

The guidelines were shared with all school sites, both elementary and secondary, and included such stipulations as: orientation had to be landscape only; artwork had to be original and some sort of representation of the Character Counts! six pillars, among other specifics.

CMS Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Cindy Martin, who heads up the character leadership committee, sat down to share details about the project. In addition to providing guidelines for artwork, tips for designing billboards were provided as well. Considerations for translating an 8.5” by 11” drawing into a piece of art the size of a billboard can be a major concern. It was therefore important, Martin described, to provide tips for billboard design, particularly when the artwork will be visible to the public for a long time.

Entries were submitted and judging was completed by the third week of October. Martin made a surprise visito to schools to personally announce winners and offer congratulations. Elementary 1st Place winner was Molly Harris, 4th grader at Zia; 2nd Place went to Jackie Miranda, 3rd grader at Mesa. The secondary winners were: 1st Place, Daniela Rodriguez and T. J. Morgan, both juniors at Clovis High School; 2nd Place went to Ashlyn O'Daniel, a senior at CHS.

The billboard will be installed on Llano Estacado east of Barry Elementary in the coming months.

Congratulations, students … well done.

Cindy Kleyn-Kennedy is the Instructional Technology Coordinator for the Clovis Municipal Schools and can be reached at [email protected]