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Market Street Elementary School faculty members get pies in the face
By Bruce Walton
BOARDMAN
The faculty members lined up on the stage in the Market Street Elementary School cafeteria with only garbage bags to shield them.
Meanwhile, hundreds of tiny voices filled the air chanting for Jim Stitt, their principal. They wanted what the school promised them, what they all gathered Thursday afternoon to see: grown-ups getting messy.
The students came together to witness, and perhaps participate in, sliming, hair coloring or throwing a pie in the face of faculty members or PTA mothers as a reward for the school’s efforts in raising more than $10,000 for the school’s first read-a-thon.
They earned the reward by exceeding their goal of $3,000.
The read-a-thon, started by Amy Ditz, PTA council president, began Feb. 29. Students needed to have some incentive for raising money for the school.
“We had a ton of kids who would normally maybe not be all that excited about reading in their free time, jumping on board,” said Julie Kamenitsa, the school’s reading-intervention specialist.
In addition to individual prizes, the school entered all the students’ names into a drawing to dirty-up teachers and PTA moms. Students also were allowed to increase their chances with purchasing each pie or hair-color ticket for $1 and $2 for a slime ticket.
For the read-a-thon, students had to read at school and home and have their parents log their minutes online at the end of the day.
Friends and family then would donate toward the minutes the children spent reading. Nearly all the school’s 394 students participated, some logging in thousands of minutes of reading.
Children whose names were called in the cafeteria sprang up from the floor, congratulated by their friends with high-fives and pats on the back, approached the faculty member of their choosing, and smacked them in the face with a pie. If they got called for the PTA mothers, they doused the moms’ heads with washable hair-coloring spray.
Then, the last event of the day came, the moment they all wanted to see: their principal getting slimed.
One by one, the students called dumped a cup of green slime on Stitt’s head, triumphantly returning to their seats.
Stitt said he plans to have the read-a-thon again next year, and told students that just because the fundraiser ended, he believed they all will read more from now on.
“If we can get them all to read here in the elementary [school], it makes things a lot easier when they get to middle school, high school and it’s a life skill forever,” he said.
Stitt said he doesn’t know where the money will go, but he and the faculty will meet to discuss how to spend it for the school.