According to Superintendent Dr. Patrick Sweeney, Fountain Hills Unified School District has a story to tell, one of highly-achieving students, clubs and athletes in a close-knit community.

Since taking over as Superintendent, Sweeney has been working with his staff, teachers, students and the community to tell that story. But while word of mouth can work wonders, he said it was time to take more active, visible steps, too. From working to bring EVIT to Fountain Hills to marketing to families inside and outside the district, FHUSD aims to have its story heard.

And along with that story comes a new look for the district, the results of a long-running effort to update the FHUSD logo.

“Last fall, we had a marketing and communications task force with teachers, parents, some community members and myself,” Sweeney said. “We were trying to put together a framework for our marketing and communications plan and one of the things that came out of that was a desire to update our websites and reevaluate and possibly update marketing materials to project the bold, positive message we want to communicate to the public.”

One of the prongs of that plan included creating a new logo that was consistent across all sites and easily distinguishable by the public.

While FHUSD has worked these past couple of years to align and unite its K-12 instruction, Sweeney and his cohorts wanted to similarly unite the “look” of the schools. Instead of having a bunch of different logos and unofficial color schemes for each site, Sweeney said the plan was to pull all local FHUSD schools under a unified umbrella. While the Flying Falcon “F” logo will still be utilized for sports, the new logo scheme will be the district standard moving forward.

Sweeney said that all sites will continue to use their remaining pools of stationary and resources moving forward, with the new logo coming into play immediately after.

“By February of last year, I believe it was, we started working with Esser Design to actually design the new logo,” Sweeney said. “They wanted examples of what we were currently using, and pulling that together was indicative of the problem we were facing. It was all over the place.”

Sweeney said the Esser team was given some key identifiers such as “bold,” “positive” and “innovative.” While discussing the strengths of the district and touring the facility, the Esser team noted that FHUSD felt like a private school setting in a public school system.

That last note led to the inclusion of a shield in the background of the logo. The fountain is self-explanatory, though Sweeney said he likes the subtlety of the fact that it also represents a Falcon taking flight.

So now that the district had its new logo, the decision was made to still allow a bit of individuality between the individual sites. For that purpose, the accent colors at each site are different, with McDowell Mountain and Four Peaks using their legacy colors of teal and gold, respectively, Fountain Hills Middle School using purple and the high school using its traditional silver. This serves the additional purpose of allowing parents and community members to, at a glance, know which site correspondence is coming from.

In the end, Sweeney said the results were better than he could have hoped for.

“I like it a lot,” Sweeney said. “It projects exactly what we wanted it to and I think it’s unique. I think that, once people get used to it, they’ll see it and instantly know, yeah, that’s Fountain Hills Unified School District.”