Senior projects back at local schools

Dozens of local senior students cleared a large hurdle on their paths to graduation recently as senior projects wrapped up at Kellogg High School and Wallace and Mullan Jr./Sr. High Schools.

Senior projects have only been a graduation requirement for a few years, but they have become an integral part of the experience that comes with being a senior in high school.

The projects as a graduation requirement were waived for the class of 2020, and then schools were given the option to waive them once again for the class of 2021 – but that wasn’t confirmed until late November after the students had already began working on them which led to project advisors and coordinators deciding to keep them as a requirement for this year.

Topics like crime analysis, photojournalism, concussion science, game warden, and even animation and character design were just a few of the 56 that were studied and presented at Kellogg High School during the full day event.

The irony with these projects seems to be that when the students choose their topics they base the choice off something they believe they want to pursue after high school, but more often than not they find – through their extensive research – that they actually do not.

“I think these projects are great for the kids because when they go into high school they have such a wide net when it comes to how you look at your future and then year-by-year it ratchets in tighter and tighter,” KHS Counselor Advisor Sarah Burkgart said. “The students begin to pinpoint things that they think they want to do, but as they declutter and learn what all goes into those fields they decide that it isn’t something that they want to do.”

Now, while that may sound detrimental to students and how they pursue their post-education dreams the projects seem to actually fine tune the students’ preferred career choices.

“A lot of them find a specialty within those careers as they go through the process,” Burkgart said. “So these projects really give the kids both sides of the spectrum.”

Burkgart pointed out two projects that really stood out to her, Zoe Baker’s and Julia Palmer’s projects.

Baker’s project centered around forensic autopsy and Palmer’s around ocular prosthesis.

“Both of these girls’ did fantastic work,” Burkgart said. “They were just two of the topics I saw that were done on things that you just wouldn’t normally think of and they were incredible.”

Members of KHS’s current junior class are now able to begin working on their projects and the information for those projects is available in the KHS Councilor’s office.

At Wallace, a tenured group of judges helped score the projects, and were very impressed with what they saw.

With a diverse array of topics, including costume design, technology, engineering, and even finance, the judges got a healthy and eclectic dose of information to base their decisions on.

“Our senior projects went really well this year,” WHS Principal Chris Lund said. “Our judges, who have been doing this for the last four or five years, said that this was the best group that they had seen.”