Local middle school wins competition to name an ITD snowplow
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RIGBY – A Rigby middle school class won a local competition by coming up with the best name for a snowplow that will keep their own roads cleared this winter.
An eighth-grade class from Farnsworth Middle School won the competition, put on by the Idaho Department of Transportation, naming the snowplow “Catch My Drift.”
A student in Laura Walker’s eighth-grade class, Brynlee Drake, says she is excited to hopefully see the snowplow around town.
“I think it’s a really cool name for 2026,” Drake says.
Drake, like many of her classmates, will be taking Driver’s Education in the next couple of months. Snowplow operators from the ITD visited their classroom to teach them how to stay safe on the roads during winter and what to do when they encounter a snowplow while driving.
“You have to be really cautious and pay attention, because you don’t know how slick (the roads) are,” Drake says. “I am worried that I’m going to be going way too slow because I’ll be too cautious.”
Students from the class were able to see the actual snowplow on Wednesday afternoon after listening to a presentation by ITD on best practices for winter driving and learning about the challenges faced by snowplow drivers every winter.
One of the operators told the class that he missed the first seven Christmas mornings with his child because he was working to ensure the community had clear, safe roads during the holidays.
“That’s just what they sign up for when they choose to do this job,” Sky Buffat, ITD’s spokeswoman, told the students. “I always like to defend our operators because the reason they do it is because they care about the communities they serve.”
The teacher of the class says it has been uplifting to watch her students learn about safe driving, and says she is thankful to ITD for taking the time to come speak to her class.
“It allowed ITD to come into my classroom and be able to talk to us, and let us see another point of view other than the big guy up (in the snowplow),” Walker says. “I love the fact that they’re coming in and talking to us and saying ‘Yes, there are people who are driving (snowplows) on the road, they have families. It puts a face to the ITD.”
Buffat says ITD is excited to continue this annual tradition and hopes the students will remember the lessons learned through this process for the rest of their lives.
“For us, it’s not just a visibility arm; it helps our snow plows to be more visible, which makes it that much safer,” Buffat says. “It’s also an educational arm, that’s why we work with the (Idaho) Department of Education and classrooms to have names submitted, so that we have the opportunity to come in.”