Kodiak High School Sign Removed

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Parents who drive their kids to the first day of school on Monday won’t see a digital sign that once stood at Kodiak High School along Rezanoff Drive.

Student government originally introduced the idea to order the sign and, together with service organizations in the community, helped fund it at a total cost of about $25,000. The school installed it in March 2009 and it was supposed to display school events and serve as an electronic communication tool. But, according to Superintendent of the Kodiak Island Borough School District, Stewart McDonald, it didn’t perform as expected.

“The sign never functioned for more than a day or two at a time before it would have components of it fail,” he says. “And we ran through the full warranty on the sign, we brought in the manufacturers, they sent people up, replaced part after part after part.”

McDonald says it was never going to work in Kodiak’s wet climate.

“The sign housing seemed to do a strange thing,” he says. “It would pull in air, which ultimately was lots of moisture, with fans into the structure, and it was all designed for ventilation, which was supersaturating the inside with liquid. And no matter how many times we coated the electronic components, it kept failing.”

McDonald says vandalism and spraypaint also posed a problem because the sign was so low to the ground. He says it’s something they’ll keep in mind when ordering the next sign.

He says the old one has been cleared away due to the construction of the high school extension, and it will not be coming back. And while they haven’t moved into the planning stage for its replacement, McDonald says the new one will be one-sided and recognize the investment that students and nonprofits put into the first one.

“It will have all of the service organizations that funded or helped fund the first one – will still be honored and placed in that area to continue their support and advertisement that they stepped up those years ago to sponsor it,” says McDonald.

He says they will try to make the new sign electronic, but they haven’t yet entered the process. Administration and staff have their focus on the beginning of school Monday, and the sign will be a project to consider in the future.