“When Isabelle has her mind made up, she’s going to get it done.”
That’s Prairie High School assistant principal and athletic director Stephanie Watts after watching Isabelle Morrell and a group of other students unload new benches in front of the school earlier this week.
Morrell, a senior and the student body president, says the idea of updating the school’s outdoor seating options first came to her during her sophomore year when the pandemic forced students to spread out around the school during meals.
“The concrete benches would fill up with water,” Morrell said, “and it just felt like a bad experience to me. I wanted coming to Prairie to be a good experience, so I started thinking about opportunities to change things.”
At the start of this year, Morrell approached Principal Susannah Woehr with the idea of building new benches to replace the older ones and add more seating around the front of the school.
“She came to me and said she had this idea, and it wasn’t just a pipe dream,” Woehr said. “She had intention behind her words and she followed through with all of it.”
Working together with Woehr and Assistant Principal Erin Thompson, Morrell approached the school’s welding instructor, Rob Smith, to ask if his students would build the frames of the new benches as part of their class. He jumped at the opportunity. Within just a couple of months, they were ready.
From there, Morrell took the frames to her father’s woodworking shop, where they milled slabs of Douglas Fir to make the back and bottoms of the benches. On Monday, the welding students helped to unload the finished benches and set them in place.
“Being able to see this actually happen is really cool,” Morrell said. “It actually makes me want to do even more for my school and more for the Associated Student Body to help make things better.”
The six new benches will replace some older ones and add seating for students in front of the school.
“Because of that sense of community that we have here at Prairie, there was just no question that this would get done,” Woehr said. “It’s just amazing what we can accomplish here, mainly because of what our students are doing.”
Morrell says she’s already been accepted to her only collegiate choice, Eastern Oregon University, and hopes to eventually run her own cattle farm.