The Christina School District needs a new brand that will improve morale amongst its employees and allow onlookers to readily identify what the state’s largest school district is all about.
That is where branding comes in., said P. Coleman du Pont, senior account supervisor with the Wilmington marketing firm Aloysius Butler & Clark. Just like people know what to expect from such high profile brands as Volvo, John Deere, Chanel and Starbucks, people need to know what the state’s largest school district is all about, du Pont said at the Christina Board of Education meeting Sept. 23 at Bayard Middle School.
For starters, Aloysius Butler & Clark determined that it is time for Christina’s classic logo to be archived, du Pont said. It features an esoteric depiction of the Christina River stretching out to the Newark area and branching into its tributaries.
The new logo features an image of a shining sun with a C in its midst, with Christina School District flushed to the right. Du Pont said it symbolizes the dawning of a new day and a bright future.
“It not only incorporates the C in the name, but all of us were thinking that it symbolized a new dawn," he said. "The old logo, some of the creative directors here confused the river with a lightning bolt."
In addition, the district should use “Cultivating Students of Distinction,” as delineated in the district’s strategic plan, as its tagline, du Pont said.
Christina was heavily criticized three years ago when it faced a budget deficit and needed a $12 million bailout from the state. But under Superintendent Dr. Lillian M. Lowery the district has met with citizens to create a new strategic plan, balance the budget and begin to improve student performance. Those are things people need to know about, du Pont said.
The majority of the board appeared to be very receptive to the new logo, with the exception of Wilmington’s George E. Evans.
The old logo symbolizes a connection of the people in Wilmington and Newark using the Christina River as an illustration, Evans said. He was referring to the fact that Christina is actually the former Newark Special School District with one-fourth of Wilmington assigned to it.
“If you want to improve the product, you have to improve service and delivery. How do we get our high schools [to be] commendable?” he said. “Is the new logo going to make that change?”
“No logo is going to allow you to succeed or, for that matter, fail,” du Pont said. “Having said that, people remember you more for what you’ve done in the last three years, not 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. We felt it was time for a clean break.”
The work of Aloysius Clark & Butler was funded by a “Focus on the Future” initiative supported by the Rodel Foundation through the Christina district’s partner organization, Junior Achievement, Christina spokeswoman Wendy Lapham said. The grant is $110,000 spread over two years to help high school students identify a career track, and $30,000 was earmarked for communications work that included the creation of the new logo.
Of the latter amount, $23,085 has been spent on consulting time the past six months, including $2,330 for the logo, Lapham said.
The logo has drawn rave reviews from employees, Lowery said.
“We really like the logo, but as Mr. Osborne said, we’re No. 19 out of 19 school districts,” she said. “But we’re not going to spend a lot of energy arguing over it. We’ll present it to the community and see what happens.”
