When the Montana Highway Patrol moved its headquarters last August from a single rented building in Helena to the state-owned North Campus of the former Montana Developmental Center in Boulder, it inherited a diverse array of buildings that now contain the agency’s car and radio shop, house visiting cadets and troopers, and host administrative and logistical functions. And now a one-off sign fabricated by students at Jefferson High School clearly marks which among those buildings is the actual administrative headquarters of the agency.
Months in the works, the sign was formally unveiled Monday by Col. Steve Lavin, who commands the Highway Patrol, and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, in a brief ceremony that also included JHS welding and drafting teacher Dave Heimann, students in Heimann’s Welding-4 class who built the sign, Superintendent Tim Norbeck, Principal Mike Moodry, and a variety of MHP staff and officers. The group gathered first in Lavin’s office inside the headquarters building, then around the cloth-shrouded sign outside in a light rain. The sign is located directly outside the headquarters building, at the back of the sprawling campus accessed by East Fourth Avenue, directly east of JHS, on Boulder’s southeast corner.
The 36-by-42-inch sign used about $200 of raw materials, Heimann said. Student welders said it took them about a month to create the sign, which they designed with Heimann’s help, then cut from steel plate using the school’s in-house plasma cutter, then refined and painted. Knudsen, who was afforded an advance peek at the sign during a tour of the campus last week with the Montana Legislature’s Law and Justice Interim Committee, told the students in Lavin’s office that the sign looked good.
“I can stick two pieces of metal together—it’s not pretty,” Knudsen said, joking with the students about his own welding abilities as they bonded over the trucks they liked to work on. Lauding the Boulder community’s “astounding” welcome of the Highway Patrol, Knudsen said that “we’d move all DOJ down here if we could pull it off,” referring to the state Department of Justice, which the Highway Patrol is within.
Luke Jackson, a 17-year-old junior who worked on the sign, said that “it’s a pretty cool thing to be a part of,” and, noting that their prowess is in welding and fabrication, the students agreed that painting the sign was the most challenging phase of the project. When asked how much time they spent on the sign, student welder Jeyden Sullivan joked that it took “too long.” Heimann said the sign became this year’s annual community project for the class when “Mr. Norbeck said, ‘Hey, we should make a sign with our neighbors,'” referring to MHP.
Unveiling the sign, Lavin said the agency was “honored and very proud to be recipients of this sign,” and said it was “awesome” to have a sign that was “homegrown.”
“Just to know that it was locally sourced is really awesome,” he said. After the unveiling, he offered commemorative MHP coins to each of the students and Heimann.
Earlier, in his office, he reminded the students: “Welding is a great profession, but if you’re willing to be a trooper, we’ve got an open door.”
