Wagner’s Chief of Police, Damon Griffith, came up with an innovative idea. He saw that the Wagner Police Department’s uniform sleeve badges were not only very basic but in desperate need of an updated design. Griffith thought instead of paying a very expensive fee for an outside company to design a new uniform badge that it would be a great opportunity to partner with the Wagner Community School and have some of the amazing young local artists design the new uniform badges because no one is more creative than high school art students. Griffith took this idea and put it into the hands of Stewart Bass, WCS Resource Officer, and Megan Zephier, WCS high school art teacher.

Bass became a lead on the project as he is the police officer at the Wagner Community School and acts as the middleman between the school and the police department. He took Griffith’s idea and presented it to Matt Yost, WCS Superintendent and Lori Kokes, WCS High School Principal. After receiving consent from the Administration, Bass took the idea to Zephier. As Bass did not want to make this a contest for the best design as to not alienate any students from the process, each student designed a badge/ gave ideas on what could be a part of the badge.

There were no guidelines for the design, it is a very open to different shapes and designs of the badge to see just how creative the art students could be while incorporating the school colors into the design. The uniform badge that is currently featured on the Wagner Police Department uniforms is that of the head of an eagle. Two of Megan Zephier’s high school art classes will be involved in this particular project. From the ideas of the 40 students will come a narrowed down list of 10. Once those ten are decided Griffith, Bass and Zephier will sit down together and build a badge from the different artists. They will more than likely pick and choose different elements from the different badges in order to come up with a creative final product that will have WCS on the badge as well to showcase the hard work and creative ideas of the WCS students. They are hoping to be able to put the uniform badge together by December of 2024. Once the uniform badge project is completed, Bass and the Wagner Police Department will hold a pizza party for those students that were involved.

The goal of this project is to help unify the community through partnering the students at WCS with the police department, which will hopefully give the students’ pride in being a part of the project and final creation. Once the uniform badge is created, it will then be digitally enhanced before putting the design onto the badges. This is just one of several upcoming projects to try to get local students more involved with the Wagner Police Department. During the Spring semester, the other high school art class that was not a part of this first project will be commissioned to paint a mural of the police badge on one of the walls in the police department at Wagner City Hall. When the painting is finished, the students involved will sign their names or initials and their graduation year, allowing them to leave their permanent mark on Wagner.