- Diman Regional Voc-Tech
- Serving Fall River, Somerset, Swansea, and Westport
Diman keeps its tiger
Members of the Diman football team gather after a practice earlier this year (Herald News file photo)
By Staff Reporter
Posted Nov 19, 2017 at 11:47 AM
FALL RIVER – Not to worry, Diman Bengals, the tiger is here to stay.
But wouldn’t it be nice for the tiger to have a few more colors in its wardrobe?
“We are looking at marketing,” said Thomas Aubin, the superintendent of Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School. “We will be in our 50th year in 2018. We have a $20 million budget with no marketing plan.
“That is bad business.”
So Aubin went before the Diman school committee Thursday, asking for permission to add another color – blue – to official Diman logos, stationary and sports uniforms.
The committee said no, Aubin said. Orange and black are the school colors. The Bengal tiger still rules.
The need for marketing continues, Aubin said.
“We are trying to market here,” Aubin said. “We are in a fight for money and we are in a fight for intellectual capacity.
“We are looking at a marketing plan to get people to stop thinking of Diman the way it was 40 years ago.”
The school won a $495,000 state skills grant this year to help it upgrade its equipment in the machine tools, drafting and electronics departments. The Fall River Development Corp. gave the school $26,000 to update computer equipment for the website development programs.
Those were just a few of the immediate needs at the school, Aubin said.
Diman, like other vocational schools in the state, is in constant need of upgrades because the marketplace is constantly changing, Aubin said. And more vocational schools are relying on corporations and foundations to supply the capital needed to stay current, he added. That requires a good marketing plan.
When it comes to private and corporate funding, Diman is competing with schools inside Interstate 495, within the Boston orbit. Those schools have Fortune 500 companies sending in money, guest lecturers and advice.
“We are looking at every avenue to get revenue and raise awareness of what we do,” Aubin said. A good marketing plan will help with that, he said.
“We don’t know what jobs will exist in 20 years,” he said. “But we are training kids for those jobs, to flourish in those markets.”
That means training 16-year-olds to fix the types of cars that do not yet exist, training their classmates to program the computers that will run HVAC systems in office buildings.
“This isn’t the Diman of your father or grandfather,” Aubin said. “That was not a bad thing, but it has changed. It had to change.”
So the school mascot and colors won’t change. The school will change, and school’s students, faculty and supporters will work to make sure the world knows about the changes, Aubin said.
“We need to find a way to boost engagement,” he said. “We’ll keep working on that.”
Email Kevin P. O’Connor at koconnor@heraldnews.com.