As part of the homecoming celebration Friday night, fans and students had a new place to shop.
Student council treasurer Logan Massey, public relations coordinator Olivia Kirkman and vice president Isabella Sifford worked together on a leadership project to open The Stable store on campus, which has been five years in the making.
When Poplar Bluff High School was renovated in 2015, an area next to the cafeteria was set aside to be a school store, but it was used more as a storage closet.
However, this year, the three students decided to help turn it into what it was planned to be.
“The room has been here since it’s been built and it was meant to be a store but no one’s ever done anything with it. No one’s ever gone through with it,” Kirkman said. “So, we just decided that we would go through with it. We wanted to make it an actual store.”
Right now, the store will be open during basketball games with pom-pom, T-shirts and other Mules merchandise available for purchase.
Looking forward to next year, advisor Jennie Randolph is waiting for approval from administration to run a special class that would man the store during the day. That way, it could be stocked with essential school supplies. If a student needed a pencil or highlighter, they would be able to get one.
While working for the store, students would learn about customer service, marketing and other essential skills.
Part of the goal of the store is to feature student work. On opening day, the school store featured one T-shirt designed by students and printed by J. Co Apparel and Promotions and another two designed and printed by the entrepreneurship class.
Along with the student-designed shirts, the store also features water bottles, lanyards, card holders and other T-shirts.
Massey said several of the items were donated by High School Principal Michael Owen, the Booster Club — which Massey’s father, Brad is president of — and some were left over from the student council’s spirit table.
He said the students will hopefully be able to form a contract with the Booster Club to sell some of those products.
“They do have that big booth during all the football games, but during basketball, they never really have anything,” he said. “So this would actually be really beneficial to them to contract their shirts to us during basketball games.”
One of the concerns the students kept in mind, Randolph said, was the target consumers as other students.
“Because he (Massey) said, ‘OK, this is the max I can charge a kid. I don’t want to charge them over 10 bucks,” she said.
The money raised from the store will go back to the student council, other merchandise for the store and projects they do. It will be cash only, Massey said, after concerns over student credit cards getting hacked were brought up. Students are in conversations with area banks about getting an ATM set up and an official with the bank to work with them next year.
“We’re definitely hoping it will happen,” Randolph said. “It was officially proposed to request permission to start talking to banks.”
While Sifford is graduating this year, she said, she’s happy to be able to see the store open while she’s still at PBHS.
“I’m very excited that it’s opening this year because originally we kind of thought it was going to open next year and I was kind of disappointed because I didn’t think I wasn’t going to get to see it,” she said.
Massey will be vice president next year and Kirkman will be treasurer, which means they’ll both be around to help see that the store continues.
“I already know that me and Olivia came up with multiple things that we’d like to add on,” he said. “We just did not necessarily have the time, nor the funding to do as of right now.”