FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – The Florence School District One school board voted at its June meeting to re-brand the school district.
 
Florence School District One School Board Chair, Barry Townsend said the new brand will help bring the district together.
 
“I think especially for us, the internal benefit of having something that could potentially unify the way everyone in the district thinks and acts,”Townsend said. “We [the board] identified that as something really important, and that if we identified, and focused on a single theme that was easily communicated that, that could be something that could help bring us together as a district.”
 
The school board chair said the new brand included a name change, logo, and new color scheme.
 
“Instead of Florence Public School District One, which can be a little bit of a mouth full, we’ll now be called Florence One Schools,” he told News13. “A lot of people already refer to us that way so, in some ways, we’re just sort of going with the name the public was already using.”
 
Townsend described, in detail, what the new brand looks like, and the meaning behind it.
 
“The logo itself is an interlocking ‘F’ and ‘1’ that is symbolic of the role that the schools play in the community,” he explained.
 
He said the colors were chosen in order to be inclusive to all of the schools in the district.
 
“The gold color is a color that’s shared by all of our high schools,” said Townsend. “And so the logo itself is designed to maintain that gold color, but then it can use the primary colors from the high schools,” he continued. “The blue from South Florence, the purple from Wilson, and the dark green from West Florence interchangeably, and they can sort of make them their own.”
 
Townsend said the new color scheme for the logo has a meaning behind it as well.
 
“A bright green,” he described. “I refer to it as growth green. That represents the role the schools play in Florence’s future growth. Then a gold that’s very similar to school bus yellow, or the color of a number 2 pencil,” he continued. “That also represents, sort of the gold standard, and where we want our districts to be, [and] where we want our individual students to be. The final color is a dark gray, a graphite gray, and that represents sort of traditional values, and was inspired by pencil lead.”
 
The school board chairman said it was important to focus the brand on the students.
 
“The strategy ultimately came down to two, very simply, words: Students First,” he said. “The idea being that, that is not only where we want our students to finish, we want them to finish first, but it’s also how we get there; by putting student achievement ahead of everything else.”
 
Townsend said the number ‘one’ is extremely significant to the district, and the new brand.
 
“I do think that the biggest opportunity is that it could provide the framework to help unify the district as a whole,” he said. “It was very specifically created to be applicable to everyone no matter what location, [or] what job position their in.”
 
He said the idea was brought up while Dr. Randy Bridges was the superintendent, but the board didn’t think it was the right time to launch the plan.
 
“This is a period of massive change, really,” said Townsend. “I mean it has been for quite some time. We’ve been building new schools, right now we’re having a leadership change that goes beyond just the superintendent,” he continued. “I think that the change that’s underway combined with the fact that we weren’t doing a good job of telling our story makes now the right time. We need to take control over our reputation.”
 
Townsend used his expertise to create the new brand, which will not cost the district any additional money.
 
“Had we done this through an external firm, the cost would probably have been prohibitive because we’ve got an awful lot of needs that we need to address within the district,” he said. “And although I think this is important and a real opportunity for us, I wouldn’t have put it ahead of taking care of facilities needs or hiring a new teacher or things like that.”
 
Townsend said the goal is to launch the district’s new brand at the start of the 2018-2019 school year.
 
“That’s when Dr. O’Malley, our new superintendent, will be starting,” Townsend said. “We targeted that as when we’d like to have it rolled out for. It’s going to be, I guess you would call it, sort of a soft roll-out. We’ll get as much done as we can.”
 
Townsend said there will be a chance for teachers to get to know the new slogan and logo.
 
“The most important group to actually get on board with this is not your external audience, at least not initially, it’s your internal audience,” he said. “There will be sort of a mini-campaign to introduce this to the employees, and the theme of that will be ‘We Are One’ with a dual meaning of that,” he continued. “That we are one unified district, but we are Florence One literally.”
 
Townsend said, overall, the message is one of district-wide unity, that will start with the school board.
 
“It’s symbolic of the fact that we can embrace our differences, but still be one,” said Townsend. “Because when we work together, we’re stronger.”