The Windham Exempted School District has never lacked school pride but has not had the chance to express its school pride for a long time. Windham finally got the chance to do so by decorating several fences around the community with put-in-cups that created several designs that illustrated school pride on Community Day on Monday.
“Windham has roots that run deeper than people realize because they tend to leave Windham and forget about it and we do not want these kids to do it,” State Farm agent Shannan Jursa told The Villager on May 18. “We want to them to invest in their community and bring the jobs back here, build their families here and build their properties here. We just want the kids to be proud of what they have and be proud to be a Bomber over there.”
Through the donations of five local businesses, the School District purchased a collection of put-in-cups, customized cups that are specially designed to fit into chain link fences and lock-fit inside the link.
The Windham School District has already started applying the cups on the fences of Ed Liddle Field and the softball field.
It has already created a 25-foot long Airplane in the fence of the parking lot in front of the football field, a four-foot “W” next to the airplane, a five-foot softball in deep right-center field and the word “BOMBERS” applied on the center field fence at the softball field.
Jursa said the designs will not stop there, as the school district will also add the word “WINDHAM”, dancing stars and hearts at the elementary school’s new playground.
“We have a whole slew of those put-in-cups that are going to go inside the fence so that the kids can see them and not the people on the outside, but it will create a barrier,” Jursa added. “They will have more playful stuff and it will privatize the kids’ playground area in the back so that people who are driving in cannot see straight into the playground. We are doing this in parts and phases because there are so many great things that are happening.
Jursa said she had the idea to start decorating fences with put-in-cups last year but she lacked the necessary funds to do so. Several months ago, she partnered with Fiscal Officer Casey Timmons to start raising money and solicited donations from several local businesses.
“We reached out to School Superintendent Aireane Curtis and said it is a surprise but we had to make sure the school was involved so we met with her and just started bouncing ideas off of each other about how we could possibly raise money to make this happen?” noted Jursa. “I told Arieane how much do you want to spend, we will fundraise it and we sat down and we started thinking about what designs they would want and how much roughly they would need to accomplish the goal of getting these for Windham.”
According to Curtis, receiving support from local businesses to drive this project was nothing to scoff at.
“I think it is great to have so many businesses in and around Windham that come and give them money for this so we can do this and have some pride around the schools and the community,” she told The Weekly Villager on Monday.
Curtis assembled Windham High School students to assist with designing the patterns on the fences around the school district. It was a diverse group of students that assisted, including student-athletes, those who belonged to the art club, members of the National Honors Society, and students who were involved with music.
“We pulled some of our finer students,” Curtis said. “The ones that we knew would be able to work collaboratively with each other and also here is the direction to go and be able to work on it.”
Windham basketball and shot put/discus thrower Briah Daniel was one of the Windham students who were selected to participate in this new project. Daniel said she was grateful to help demonstrate Windham’s school pride.
“I think the biggest thing is everyone helping out,” Daniel told The Weekly Villager on Monday. “We are a small town but when we need it, everyone comes together to help out and you can see that with all of the businesses helping to donate to get these.”
Curtis said that while there are no plans to update the designs, the possibility exists that Windham will have more designs created to apply around the school district depending on how the community receives this new initiative.
