You could feel the electricity in the air as the PTA officers made their final rounds to judge each classroom for the annual School Spirit Week Decorating Contest before the all-school awards assembly in the church sanctuary.

After turning my sixth grade classroom at Praise Christian Academy in North Versailles, Pa. into a basketball gymnasium, complete with the church choir risers as bleachers, it was fruitless to try and quell my exuberant students let alone try and teach them fractions or sentence diagramming.

So for the first 60 minutes of school that day in November 1993, it was social hour. Some of the students milled about the room chatting with one another while others took the opportunity to pull out and play the board games I had purchased for indoor recess on rainy days.

Ever since the Parent Teacher Association instituted the contest some years back for the elementary/junior high school, the eighth grade had always won. But with all the extra effort I took to decorate my entire classroom instead of just the entryway, I was determined to change the outcome.

Although, it was kind of ironic that both the seventh and eighth grade also put aside the usual door decorating in lieu of designing a décor scheme for their entire classrooms as well.

Of course, there was no irony about it. It was the simple fact that a couple of my female students, who were gaga over some of the eighth grade boys, were unable to keep our surprise a secret until the big reveal.

In addition, a couple of eighth graders, my former students no less, barged into my classroom when they were directed to keep out and saw everything we were doing in preparation for the contest.

The reining top cats of the school went so far as to have the same gymnasium-themed classroom and claimed they came up with the idea themselves.

I began preparing for the annual event two months earlier. But as soon as I went downstairs one afternoon to use the overhead projector in the multipurpose room to start making the bulletin board materials needed for the huge project, the rumors began to fly.

It just so happened that the cheerleading squad was at the other end of the large room going over some new cheers for the upcoming sports season.

Ironically, I was tracing cutouts of four cheerleaders to place on the bulletin boards in the back of our classroom. They each had a word bubble over their head.

In addition, I had three pennants on either end of the display… go… fight… win. And believe it or not, I actually found little pom-poms to pin to the hands of the construction paper cheerleaders. So it was 3-D. Now that was definitely cool.

The front bulletin board over the chalkboard stated: Good luck to the P.C.A. Eagles — our team mascot. It also had mini basketballs placed throughout with the names of the sixth grade students on the boys and girls teams

As if I didn’t have enough bulletin boards to decorate, I created a shadowbox bulletin board on another wall with silhouettes of basketball players going up for a jump ball along with an eagle about to take flight with the words: The Screaming Eagles.

With two closets in my classroom, they became the men’s and women’s restrooms. The large nook where the student lockers stood became the locker room with an arrow pointing toward the showers. Another recessed space used for the school newspaper became the press box.

I enlisted the help of several students after school one day to make a corner concession stand and a scoreboard. That’s the day the eighth graders barged into the room. Not only did they see everything we were planning, one of them actually spilled their drink on the scoreboard, which we had to scrap and start from scratch again.

But the icing on the cake was the mini basketball court created with four 4 x 8 sheets of pressed wood laid out in the center of the room with life-size basketball hoops at either end.

And as if that wasn’t enough, we had a life-size cardboard cutout of Michael Jordon to greet anyone who entered our classroom turned gymnasium.

I thought for sure we had this competition in the bag until they announced the winner at the all-school awards assembly — the eighth grade. Imagine that.

Needless to say, I was furious.

As I ushered my angry students back to our classroom, I had a heated discussion with one of the PTA members, who was the head judge for the competition.

I was informed the eighth grade performed a basketball themed skit as part of their presentation. “That was not part of the competition requirements,” I spewed with fire coming from my nostrils. Even without the points for the skit, I was told the eighth grade still won by five points.

I knew that was a bunch of malarkey, especially when I went downstairs to the eighth grade classroom to take photos for the school newspaper. They had already dismantled the entire display.

I later discovered their bleachers were their desks stacked on top of one another, their basketball court was made of construction paper, and the basketball hoops were pieces of wood with bottomless buckets attached.

Yeah… the competition was definitely rigged. Better luck next year.

Mark S. Price
https://www.clintonnc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/web1_New-Mark-S.-Price-1.jpgMark S. Price

By Mark S. Price

Contributing columnist

Mark S. Price is a former city government/county education reporter for The Sampson Independent. He currently resides in Clinton.