NORTH ADAMS — Students from two local high schools recently combined their engineering and writing skills for an upcoming project that will honor the city’s hometown heroes.

Created over several months this winter, students from McCann Technical School’s computer-assisted drafting and metal fabrication programs designed and built 100 brackets and poles that will soon display banners of local veterans on downtown light posts. Simultaneously, eighth graders at Drury High School interviewed veteran families to create a website with corresponding biographies for each banner.

The 131 banners will be revealed in a ceremony outside City Hall on May 22. Each year, they will go up in the spring and be taken down shortly after Veterans Day.

Kurtis Durocher, the Northern Berkshire veterans services agent and 20-year Army veteran, had his eye on adding banners to downtown since he started the role in early 2025.

“I just want everyone to get the patriotic feeling of honoring and remembering,” said Durocher, who was deployed five times throughout his service to Afghanistan and Iraq. “Some are living and some are dead. It's celebrating what these individuals stand for.”

With the help of the CAD shop at McCann Technical School, students fabricated veteran's banner holders that will be installed on lamp posts in downtown North Adams. From left are Jaxson Cunha, 17; Nicholas Lavigne, 18; Ryan Reynolds, 16; Lucas Lapointe, 15; Dakota Hurlbut, 14; Colby Gelinas, 15; Ziarra Martin-Levesque, 15; and Reighan Douglas, 15.

He reached out to the high schools because he wanted to include the students in that remembrance.

“Including the high schools gets the kids to realize that there is still patriotism in our country, even though there's a lot of craziness going on.”

Led by McCann instructors Josh Meczywor, Glenn Andrews, John Kline and Greg King, select freshman, sophomores and juniors worked in their respective shops to create the brackets.

McCann Tech metal fab shop students fabricated every part of the veterans banner holders, including the bracket on the post.

First, computer-assisted drafting students made mockup drawings of the brackets and the poles they attach to. They then created a final drawing on a modeling program, said junior Brody Stratton.

“When it was brought up to me, I thought I'd participate,” Stratton said. “It feels like we owe something to people who’ve fallen and honor them in a nice way.”

McCann Technical School students in the computer-assisted drafting program designed models that their peers used to build brackets. Those brackets will hold upcoming hometown hero banners that honor living and fallen veterans from North Adams.

Next, metal fabrication students made and assembled the pieces. Freshman Reighan Douglas was just a few weeks into his program when he started cutting down the shipment of metal that became the brackets.

“Then we … punched the square holes for the bolts to go through and then we went over to the press break and bent the piece at around 90 degrees,” he said.

Next, students cut the poles to size and threaded the ends with a threading machine, creating small lines that allow it to connect to the bracket.

“You put the pole in it and it spins it,” said freshman Dakota Hurlbut.

After the pole and brackets were made, students secured them so they could weld them together, said juniors Jaxson Cunha and Nicholas Lavine, who worked together on welding.

McCann metal fab shop students Jaxson Cunha, 17, and Nicholas Lavigne, 18, explain how they fabricated veteran's banner holders that will be installed later this spring on lamp posts in downtown North Adams.

"Once Nick and I were done welding, we hit [the bracket] with a wire wheel — to clean it up, make it look nice and take away sharp edges,” Cunha said. “We probably did that to all 100 pieces twice.”

Andrews, a metal fabrication instructor, said there is a lot of planning that goes into a project this scale.

“If I have to make 100 parts compared to two, I’m going to approach that differently,” he said.

Students worked with instructors to design the order of the production line that would create the most correct and efficient product.

“With how many we made, it made it a lot easier in the end,” said freshman Colby Gelinas.

Because not all of the students who worked on the project were in the same shop and the brackets had to work with existing ones the city has, the consistency of the work was “really important,” said Meczywor, the CAD instructor.

“[The students] make it sound like this is easy, but as people who came out of industry, these students are just as fast as people we've worked with,” he said. “If you look at these, every one looks identical, and that says a lot to the level of detail.”

Banners will soon line downtown North Adams lightposts that honor local fallen and living veterans, including Army Pfc. Michael R. DeMarsico II, 20, a North Adams native who was killed in Afghanistan in 2012.

As a bonus, Durocher said the student collaboration saved the city about $6,500.

“Its feels very achieving, we as CAD students, who have been in school for three years, are already contributing to real-world projects,” junior Ben Therrien said.

For the last piece of the project, Patrick Boulger’s civics class at Drury is currently finishing a webpage that corresponds to each veteran on the banner. When residents and tourists walk downtown, they will be able to scan a QR code that takes them to a biography page of each person, created from family interviews Boulger's class conducted.

The website will be live before May, when the families of veterans reveal the banners.

“The most satisfying part will be actually seeing them hung,” said sophomore Lucas Lapointe. “I feel proud its being shown and of course [that they will be] downtown.”

When building the brackets, Durocher gave students a prototype banner to test the brackets, one that will honor Army Pfc. Michael R. DeMarsico II, 20, a North Adams native who was killed in Afghanistan on Aug. 16, 2012, from injuries from an improvised explosive device.

“It was pretty cool to be a part of something like that,” Gelinas said. “He fought for our country, so it was nice to do something for him.”