Students' book captures Queen Creek's changes

A group of honors history students from Queen Creek High School have photographically documented some of the changes throughout the ever-growing Queen Creek in a new hardcover book, "Queen Creek 2008 - Through Our Eyes."

Photographs of the old and new town halls, street signs, buildings, railroad tracks and streets around town fill the book, along with comments by students on what the changes mean for town residents.

About 35 students in last school year's 11th grade United States/Arizona honors history class spent about four months taking photos, writing the introduction and the captions, and putting the self-published book together on the computer using MyPublisher.com. The students in Carolyn Vail's classes began working on the project in February.

"We wanted to get the contrast between the old and the new," said senior Meg Higginson. "Queen Creek is changing so fast and this is how we see it."

Senior Karina Gneck said Queen Creek still has "this unique air to it."

"We wanted to show the contrast between the booming town and the old horse town," Gneck said. "They both still get along fine."

Senior Megan Traichal said she thinks the book turned out "amazing."

"It's a good reflection of how normal people who live here think about Queen Creek," Traichal said. "These are the things we see everyday."

Senior Canyon Shirley said his family has lived in Queen Creek for about 14 years, and the book is a way to preserve the changes.

"The biggest change is all the houses," he said. "There used to be fields everywhere.

"Traffic is also a big problem," Shirley said. "There used to be no cars. Now there are traffic lights instead of stop signs."

Preserving the changes is the goal Vail had wanted. She said in this day and age of e-mail, text messages and digital photos, history is not being saved and will be lost unless it is documented.

The class received a $300 grant from the Queen Creek Schools Education Foundation. They used the money to buy a book for each of the district's school libraries and the town library.

The book will also soon be available at the San Tan Historical Society on the corner of Queen Creek and Ellsworth roads in Queen Creek, said Nonda Brown, a society member.

"I liked the way they organized the book, from the open ended to the future," said Brown, who is also an English and psychology teacher at Queen Creek High. "It's so important to impress upon the students how important history is. They are a part of history."

For information on buying the $40 book, e-mail Carolyn Vail at cvail@qcusd.org.