Walk into any teacher’s room, and you will find decorations all over the place. A collection of flags from their college, a mug their kid made, their favorite movie poster, a neat thing they found at Hobby Lobby, their past students’ artwork, or anything and everything in between. Every one of those things has a story behind it and how it got there.

Here at HHS, our teachers are no different. While you’ll see the familiar trinkets that adorn the empty spaces in our classrooms, most of our teachers’ favorite features have been their students’ works, keeping their influence alive here at Hancock.

“My favorite classroom decoration is an addition from last year,” Innovative Tech teacher Trey Dittrich said. “It is a ceiling tile made by one of my former robotics students. This student was an excellent artist and often drew incredible fantasy and reptilian creatures, which I would discuss with them.”

ELA 3 Teacher Elizabeth McMurray has also followed suit in keeping her students’ creations, a lot coming from ELA 3’s poetry unit.

“My favorite decorations in my room are the blackout poems I have displayed from former students,” McMurray said. “These were created over the span of a couple of years, with students choosing a variety of pages from literary classics to work with during the poetry unit; they are each so unique and meaningful in their own ways.”

In the Library, it’s a little different. Each month or so, the decorations change with plenty of student submissions from library activities filling the bookshelf tops and empty glass windows.

“My favorite decoration in here … is the puzzle wall,” said Librarian Kirsta Dunn. “I just think it’s cool, looking up [and] thinking about all the kids that did it, and it’s going to be up there even after they are gone.”

Wherever the decoration came from, each one has its own place in each teacher’s heart.

“Every time I look at them, I remember the student who created the artwork, and it always makes me smile,” Art teacher Laura Leyes-Woods said.