The seventh-grade team, the Olympians, had won every in-school competition at Herndon Middle School last year, so math teacher and team member Jenni Glaskas knew everyone would be gunning for them this time around when the annual canned food drive was announced — which is precisely how she likes it.
"Last year my team won every competition, so this year everyone wanted to beats us," said the self-proclaimed "most competitive" person. "They had posters in the hall that said, 'Beat the Olympians.' Dr. Jenkins even made morning announcements."
All the prompting and prodding ended up backfiring, however, and instead spurred the defending champions on even more.
"One girl brought in 99 cans. I offered incentives like 15 cans equals a stamp, which equals a homework pass," Glaskas said. "I sent out spies to see what everyone else was doing."
The Olympians ended up retaining their title by collecting more than 2,100 cans, earning them a pizza party, but it is the families that will be helped by local charity group LINK that really won. The friendly competition, held Nov. 12-19, led to the highest haul on record at the school — more than 6,800 cans.
"IT'S THE MOST we've ever done in the shortest amount of time," said social studies teacher Jeannine Cotner, sponsor of the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS), which organized the drive. "There were almost 7,000 cans, which is great because what I hear is the shelters have almost 200 more families than last year."
This was the first year the school organized the drive by teams, which may have helped increase the donations. In the past, the drive was done by individual classes. The school has an enrollment of 1,240 students with anywhere from 120 to 140 students comprising a team — made up of the four core classes, English, math, social studies and science.
"Stressing the team seemed to make it more successful," Cotner said.
Principal Frank Jenkins thinks it's just the competitive nature of the middle-schoolers and their teachers. He also said the events of the past year including memory of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the more recent sniper attacks have had an impact on the students.
"I think the reason for the increase in donations is due to what has been going on in our society and when it comes to competition, kids can be kids again," Jenkins said. "With the sniper, they couldn't be kids. They couldn't go outside. Kids, and especially middle-school kids, need to go outside. They need to run around and smell the fresh air."
JENKINS SAID a little friendly competition is good for the children and some were clearly more competitive than others. In several cases, classes held back some cans from their daily collections until the last day in order to prevent the other teams from knowing how much they had collected. In one case, a substitute teacher had placed the cans outside the classroom, not realizing how tight the competition was. Jenkins saw the cans and advised her to keep them in the room until they were collected.
Each day, Cotner sent NJHS members out to collect the cans and record the haul. After a while, however, her classroom began overflowing with cans and they had to be moved to another location. All available floor and shelf space of a storage closet was used, with overspill filling a corner of Cotner's room. Representatives of LINK were scheduled to pick up the boxes of cans Friday, Nov. 22.
Cotner said it wasn't an easy victory for the reigning champs either. There were two teams that came close to completing the upset. She said the competition really created a seventh grade vs. eighth grade rivalry, which will probably become the norm for future drives.
"It was really humiliating for the eighth-graders to get beat by seventh-graders," Cotner said.