The Northern Light School Division will be sporting a new look…eventually.
During a regular board meeting last Wednesday, members unanimously voted to adopt a new logo based on the 20th anniversary logo currently displayed on NLSD's website.
The Northern Light School Division will be sporting a new look... eventually.
During a regular board meeting last Wednesday, members unanimously voted to adopt a new logo based on the 20th anniversary logo currently displayed on NLSD’ s website.
The decision wasn’ t made overnight. Discussions began at a meeting a month ago when board members debated a possible logo change. Opinions in the room were split at the time, and the board moved to turn to NLSD stakeholders for a second opinion.
Students and staff, along with members of the general public, were given a survey that asked them to choose between NLSD’ s current logo and the proposed new one. The survey had three questions: Which logo do you feel best represents Northern Lights? Which logo do you feel best illustrates our mission statement? Overall, which design do you think should be used as the official logo for Northern Lights School Division?
Among staff and students, response to the third question was overwhelmingly positive, with 73.5 per cent of staff voting in favour of the new design and 64 per cent of students favouring the change.
On the public side, the results were as close as they could be, but the new logo won by a hair, claiming 50.6 per cent of the vote.
NLSD spokesperson Nicole Garner said the most interesting part of the public result wasn’ t the tight voter split, but the comments they received. When the POST initially reported on the proposed logo change, Facebook commenters expressed concern about the cost of such a change. The same sentiments carried over into NLSD’ s public survey.
“We would get comments... ‘Yeah, I really like the second logo, but I’ m voting for the current logo because I don’ t want you to spend the money to change it’ ,” she said. “The strong impression from the public survey wasn’ t so much liking one over the other, it was concern over the cost.”
In the meeting last Wednesday, Garner said the cost of changing everything bearing the current logo - from trustees name-tags, to electronic signs [the bulk of the cost], vehicle decals, school banners, and letterhead - would cost an estimated $22,000.
In order to keep the cost of introducing the new logo down, it will be implemented as items bearing the current logo need to be replaced. Things like signs and vehicles bearing the current logo will remain unchanged until they reach the end of their natural life cycle. When those items are replaced, they will take on the new logo. Garner used a sign in Cold Lake sitting in front of an unused building as an example, saying that if the sign were moved to a new location, the division would change the logo on the sign then. She also used division vehicles as an example.
“Another example would be vehicles we have logos on. Eventually those vehicles are going to mile out and we’ re going to want to dispose of them... When we purchase a new one, it would have the new logos on it. If we’ re logo-ing a vehicle, that’ s a cost we would have with a new vehicle anyway,” she said. “It’ s stuff we would be looking at changing regardless of if we changed the logo [itself] at this point.”
At the same meeting when the logo change was first discussed, board members also talked about the possibility of changing its name to Northern Lights Public Schools.
The matter came up again last Wednesday, though its stay was brief. Garner told board members the estimate cost of changing the board’ s name was around $300,000. Though there was no official motion on the issue, board members decided to publicly promote NLSD’ s public-ness more, in lieu of an outright name change.
Garner said much of the high cost of a name change is in changing electronic data.
“That would be if we change everything, like our website domain name, which would necessitate a change in all of our emails and a whole transfer of all the data,” she said. “A lot of the [cost] is actually on the technology end.”
