Acadian Technical Campus in Crowley hosted this year’s annual regional SGA conference. SGA members from seven campuses listened as the city of Crowley and Acadia Parish were promoted during guest speaker’s Charlotte Jeffers, Crowley tourism coordinator, talked about both to the group.
Each year the conference is hosted at a different campus and each year the host campus must find a guest speaker. This year the rotation landed on ATC and Pat Miers, ATC assistant campus dean, decided to give Jeffers the job as guest speaker.
During her presentation, Jeffers highlighted Crowley’s history and tourism attractions and also related current city projects to projects other cities are going through.
Jeffers did not come alone however as Miers and Jeffers extended the invitation to Crowley High School’s multimedia class and its teacher, Tammy Meche.
Jeffers opened up the Crowley promotion presentation and five students from the class finished off and handed out all in attendance some of the Crowley postcards the students created last semester.
During her time speaking, Jeffers spoke about the beginnings of the city’s main street project and how many other area cities are doing similar projects all to promote rural tourism, pointing directly to Opelousas work to create an Orphan Train museum.
She also discussed the various places tourists have traveled from and what led them to Crowley in the first place.
Jeffers then moved to specific tourism spots in the city such as Crystal Rice Plantation, Kelly’s Landing, the historic district filled with homes and Crowley’s Historic Main Street sites, including the Rice Theatre, The Gallery and the Grand Opera House of the South. Jeffers also teased the crowd with a little information about the Grand Opera House of the South.
“The opera house has two resident ghosts,” she said. “But, I’m not going to tell you about the ghosts, you’re going to have to take a tour to find out about them.”
Jeffers also discussed the current renovation work continuing in the area, which should lead to some people living along Historic Main Street again.
“I know that once people are living on Main Street, it will create a whole new dynamic,” she said. “Crowley is heading in the right direction and Acadia Parish is heading in the right direction as well.”
She also stated that the ATC is also “another jewel” of Crowley, and the parish, pointing to the many retirees and high school kids that have taken advantage of the many ATC classes offered.
“It has really helped Acadia Parish,” said Jeffers.
Jeffers then turned the podium to the five Crowley High students to showcase their work in promoting Crowley.
The students showed off and handed out postcards that were created with the help of the Acadia Parish School Board (they printed the cards for the students) as well as the videos they made that highlighted Crowley’s history and tourist attractions.
The students created these, along with other media projects, in the first semester of this year. This semester, they are working on web design and will have a crowley website that is targeted toward area youth. The videos and other media created in the first semester will be on the website as well as coloring pages for younger kids and more. They also announced plans to update the 1987 illustrated map of Crowley.
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