Jefferson C-123 Homecoming

Congratulations to the Jefferson C-123 School, a small rural school without football, who holds an indoor homecoming.

Students learn to design, create and complete a float that will fit through the gym door and meet the theme, decided on by a student group, for homecoming.  They create a poster and participate in theme activities all week. 

There are trivia questions daily that each class may collaborate with their teacher sponsors to answer.  They are not to use outside resources.  Some questions are academic in nature: usually covering the core classes, others are trivia related to school history.  The winning class is allowed to lead the lunch line, behind royalty on Friday which is banquet day.

Students learn to work with their whole class to go through the complete process of “building” the class float and poster projects to meet a theme and spec of a judges scoring guide.  Their teachers work with the class to complete these activities.  This is work on a different level than the classroom work where teachers are their “bosses”.  The student gets to work alongside their “bosses”.  The project begins with the designing, planning and ordering of materials. The students may work on these projects outside of class the month before homecoming.  This is done in some parents shop or garage. They then have one school day to bring the projects to the school and complete them within the school day. Either parents or teachers supervise these out of school activities.  These projects are judged by a group of outside people, usually including an art teacher or artist, and some retired teachers and community members.

Students learn to respect their classmates’ unique abilities that may not be apparent in the structured classroom.  They may discover that the student who struggles in language arts is skilled with wood and other building tools.  The quiet student who has all the questions in math class is a wonderful artist or another student excels at problem solving.  The student who can accurately measure a required piece may not be the same student who comes up with the fix needed to make the project work together.  The student who has no physical building skills may be the one to create the lettering for float theme.

Even the king and queen coronation is many times a surprise.  The school is a k-12 in one building.  Students 7-12 may vote on the king and queen.  Sometimes the winners are not the most popular or beautiful, but the student who takes time to talk to that 7^th grader who is struggling.  It may be the student who makes a habit of smiling at everyone they see including those lowly junior high students every day.  It may be the senior who rides the bus and reads to the third grader on the hour long bus ride.  Other students notice this kind of behavior.

Congratulations to the Jefferson students, staff and community for creating another outstanding homecoming.