When you think of marquee signs, you might think of a movie theater. Maybe you think of a concert venue. Heck, you might think of an airport. What marquee signs probably don’t bring to mind is your local elementary school. However, by the end of this article, you’re going to be signing petitions for every school to have scrolling marquee signs. Hear us out:
Four Reasons Every School Should Have a Marquee Sign
- School marquee signs improve communication with parents and the community.
The average school has hundreds of children, and dozens of teachers and faculty, and hundreds of parents of those children. That’s a lot of moving pieces and getting the word out about upcoming events or closures or fundraising drives (and so on) can be difficult. Teachers might send announcements home with students, but they end up crumpled up in the bottom of backpacks, lost forever. The luckiest of school systems might have notification processes in place that send parents emails or text messages about alerts. However, those alerts aren’t meant for notifications like fall festivals and food drives. It’s difficult to get the word out about things like that.
On the other hand, school electronic signs offer a method of notification that everyone sees at drop off and pick up. It’s simple. You don’t have to count on first grade students to relay a flyer to their moms about PTA meetings and things. In fact, even the members of the community who don’t have children and otherwise have no way of hearing about it are notified of the school events that are open for all to participate. - Save time and money.
When marquee signs are not used for communications, the alternatives are sending letters home or contacting parents one by one by phone. The labor to do this costs the school an arm and a leg. Labor is one of the biggest costs that schools deal with, and many schools already struggle with budgetary issues.
Maybe writing a letter doesn’t take as much time as calling each parent individually, but it wastes a ton of school resources… And we already talked about the effectiveness of those letters that never make it to the parents anyways.
On the other hand, updating a message on a school sign takes a few minutes. After the initial investment of installing the school marquee sign, the cost of updating it is pretty much nil. Not only is it more effective than sending a letter home to all the parents, this saves the school valuable resources that can be put to better use focusing on what matters, the kids’ educations! - Amp up the school spirit.
Maybe you don’t find school spirit to be an important enough dynamic to spend the money on a fancy LED sign for. However, studies show that moral in the school has a profound impact on the engagement of the students in their education. This is why there are pep rallies before sports games. For that matter, that’s the entire reason for the football team at all.
When a school has a dynamic sign, it’s a huge boost in moral. Your school marquee sign is able to boost publicity for upcoming sports games, or the science fair, or spelling bee, or the sixth grade modernization of Romeo and Juliet. Or whatever. Your school scrolling sign can congratulate the swim team winner. It can be a reminder that your football won the championship. That amps up participation, which encourages moral. Which helps kids get invested in their education. - Keep it simple, stupid.
We’ve already talked about why you want to use a scrolling sign over sending out letters or making phone calls to each parent in the school. We’ve already covered it and we aren’t here to waste your time. Now let’s talk about why you want to use a scrolling sign over the old school letter signs.
Those signs where you arrange all the letters by hand have a lot of drawbacks. It’s a hassle and time-consuming to put them together. If you don’t have enough S’s to finish your sentence, you have to use 5s. On the other hand, marquee signs are super simple to update the message on, and you always have enough S’s.
Do you have questions about school marquee signs? Share in the comments below!
