Sign Celebrates The Frisco Kids

School administrators continually face the challenge of aligning budgetary parameters with students’ educational needs. And, despite the professed good intentions, promises and grandstanding by high-profile politicians, consultants and others who promise panaceas to remedy education in the US, most improvements are achieved by initiatives taken at the local level. And, of course, thanks to teachers who are dedicated, creative and resourceful.
Students at Frisco, CO’s elementary school were beneficiaries of such resourcefulness and benevolence. School administrators and teachers developed a high-quality curriculum, and applied for International Baccalaureate school certification, which affirms that it implements programs that help students’ critical-thinking skills and character development. Frisco Elementary officials also pursued certification as a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) institution.
Wisely, Frisco’s school district wanted to invest in a sign that would provide an effective entry statement to celebrate these certifications. Officials enlisted Frisco-based House of Signs to fabricate a monument sign. House of Signs owner Roger Cox’s twin daughters are 5th-grade students at Frisco Elementary, having been enrolled there since kindergarten. Considering this vested interest, he decided to put a personal stake in the project.
“The school district allocated a $7,500 budget for the sign,” he said. “I was afraid that this budget would limit our creativity, so I decided to donate our services to cover all expenses beyond that amount to make the sign a showcase consistent with the school’s forward thinking. We ended up donating approximately $12,000 worth of time and materials to the project.”
When formulating the design concept, Cox said the House of Signs team considered how to make the sign sleek, rather than a “large billboard sign,” to make it more compatible with the picturesque mountain landscape. He said, “The cantilevered design with arched beams points toward the school and invites you to enter. The perforated posts emphasize the natural background.”
The sign’s site hadn’t previously received a sign installation, so House of Signs excavated its location, and installed 42-in.-long, 1-in.-wide J-bolts, which were embedded into two separate concrete footers. They MIG-welded the arched I-beams to the large steel plates that received the bolts which were crane-lifted into place.
House of Signs fabricator Randy Ballheim cut the vertical support beams out of ½-in.-thick plate steel, bent ¼-in.-thick, 2.5-in.-wide, flat-bar steel to match the same radius, then MIG-welded the bar steel to the plate steel. The beams’ circular cuts also featured cut sections of pipe that were welded inside each opening to create the appearance of custom I-beams. The shop welded horizontal supports of varying sizes into each arched beam. The sign’s distinctive, metallic finish comprises an etching-primer application that’s followed by Matthews acrylic-polyurethane coatings mixed into a custom charcoal-gray hue.
House of Signs designed the icons, such as the STEM and IB World School logos, via a combination of Adobe Illustrator, Gerber Omega 5.0 and Vectric Aspire 3-D rendering software. The shop milled the pieces using 15-lb. Duna Corafoam® HDU on a Gerber Sabre 408 CNC router, then painted the elements with Modern Masters, TJ Ronan and Sherwin-Williams acrylic paints.

To provide the icons with the heft required to withstand windy Colorado winters, fabricators affixed them to ¾-in.-thick MDO backers. Installers adhered them to the signfaces using West System two-part epoxy. Cox said the sign’s asymmetrical design presented a challenge because it made alignment of the sign’s myriad horizontal parts complex. Also, House of Signs mounted all components to hidden fasteners, which increased engineering and production time.
House of Signs’ second phase of sign fabrication for Frisco Elementary will involve an interior-sign program whose designs will be determined by a contest the school will hold to select winning drawings made by students, which the shop’s design team refined. The shop also recruited the next generation of signmakers – and evangelized signs’ benefits – by inviting 30 of the school’s students to the shop to learn about the work House of Signs does, as well as the importance of good design.