All upperclassmen at Franklin High School know of our notorious ‘Franklin STRONG’ branding (since we’ve seen it posted everywhere for two years.) “At Franklin we Strive to be Thoughtful, Respectful, Organized, Neighborly, Generous.” The Franklin STRONG brand was created when we moved to Marshall. The Climate Team was consulted to help rebrand and started by ‘identifying the core values of our school.’ Eventually, they all came up with the acronym we see posted up in the halls every day. These are values Franklin represents, and they are good to keep in mind so we can conduct ourselves well. It is who we are.
“These are the values that our students, our staff, [and] our administrators came up with and defined and said that ‘these are the expectations of how we will live in this small community,’” said Vice Principal Christopher Frazier, who is in charge of Franklin STRONG branding and enforcement. As a neighbor to Franklin, I would like to re-emphasize the ‘N’ — Neighborly.
Many students here are neighborly, but of course there are some who aren’t. I have lived in my current home since I was in elementary school at Atkinson and every day I’d walk by Franklin. I’d see the students and the campus. There were a lot of issues back then for me. The fact that as a little kid I was terrified of older kids wasn’t helped by the trash in Clinton Park and the graffiti on the playground. Six years later, the campus has changed and students have come and gone and I believe that we can be different.
This is just my experience. Franklin student Acme McConnell (12) is also a neighbor to the Franklin High School campus, and he hasn’t had many bad experiences with it in the past, “for the most part.”
“There’s (never) any trash on my yard or anything,” McConnell explained. However, his freshman year he did experience people (thinking they were Franklin students) smoking in front of his house.
“I think we sometimes take our community for granted,” said Frazier. He sometimes gets calls with complaints about littering and issues with students from the neighborhood. He also believes that although most of the students are neighborly, there are always outliers and that there’s room for improvement.
After the past two years of Franklin being at Marshall, I haven’t had an active high school nearby for a while. Understandably, it was slightly calming to not have to worry about what would happen to the neighborhood, but I am also happy to have the real Franklin back. It is no longer 2010, and this generation of teenagers is different from the one back then. As a neighbor, I ask students to keep Franklin STRONG in mind when at school. We can set a good example for the future of Franklin.
