Another Woodlands Mystery Solved...

Recently, an anonymous former Prefect (I'll call him Eric) approached a member of HTP's staff with his story about our school sign. The school sign, for those of you who haven't been here long, caused some controversy when it was built in 1995 due to the fact that it cost the Prefects $12,000 (this is the official Prefect figure) to build. According to Eric, the reason the sign was so costly was because only half of the alleged cost of the sign (which Eric claims is $16,000) actually went to the sign contractor. The rest of the money was supposedly "skimmed" off the top by someone associated with Prefects, and used to pay for a cabin somewhere in Northern Ontario. Now I've heard a few different people with similar stories to this one, and they all sounded pretty fake. The only thing giving the story any kind of credibility is the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, the sign was so expensive.

While most people might think $12,000 is too much for a sign, I'm sure most people also have no idea how much a sign like ours should cost. I certainly didn't, so I decided to do a bit of research. I started by phoning a few local sign companies and pretending that I wanted to build a school sign just like the one in front of the Woodlands. Answers varied, but most said they could build me a sign about the same size as our sign for under $5,000. When I asked them about the possibility of a sign costing more than $10,000 (my "budget" for the sign I wanted to buy), most assured me that this was not likely. For $12,000 one company offered to build a sign with back-lit neon, while another said that I could get a sign that was eight feet wide and six feet high.

Up to this point, my findings actually seemed to be supporting the cabin story, but I didn't have anything really concrete. There is, as I soon learned, no standard for school signs, so it was difficult to get an accurate estimate of how much our sign cost to build. I decided to show a picture of the sign to a few sign companies and ask them how much it would cost to get a sign just like it. Barry Tonner, of Tonner Signs put the price at $4,500 (plus $500 for letters), while Tony Henrique of Brooks signs said he could build a sign like the one in my picture for $6,000. More evidence for the cabin story, but still nothing conclusive either way.

Finally I decided that I should phone the company who built the sign, Scarborough based Neon Products, and ask them about how much the thing really cost (why didn't I think of this in the beginning?). Pretending that I wanted to buy a sign exactly like the one in front of the Woodlands, I was put in contact with the sales rep. responsible for the installing of the Woodlands sign, a man named Barry Compton (or Crompton, I'm not sure because I was listening to the phone with my bad ear). Barry said that the Woodlands sign had cost $12,500 to build, excluding the cost of wiring up the lights (which most sign companies say would cost anywhere from $500 to $1500). The main reason for the sign's high cost was the three dimensional 'W' on the top, which was designed by a third party designer and constructed out of elaborate multi-colour aluminium blades. Barry recalled the sign making job as having "a lot of problems" and as being "a one off job", unlike any sign he had ever built before.

The average price for a school sign made by Neon Products is about $10,000, according to Barry. This average school sign would basically look exactly like the one in front of the school, minus the fancy 'W'. Neon Products in fact had just installed such a sign at Erindale High school, and is in the process of putting one up at Mount Carmel (its in Meadowvale). In fact, Neon Products seems to be pretty popular with Mississaga schools, since it has also built the school signs at Lorne Park, St. Joseph's, and Cawthra Park. I for one can't understand why this company is so popular if their prices are so much higher then any other sign company I talked to. So to sum things up, for those of you who skipped straight to the end, no money was stolen, the sign was just really expensive. Maybe someone at Neon Products knows someone high up in the Peel Board. In the biblical sense.