There is none higher

We're a couple of months since this year's Pasta for Pennies campaign wrapped up. We've been organizing reward parties (sundaes for one class, pizza for three classes, pasta for four, donuts for 250 students and staff - you know how it is) and writing thank you notes since then, but this week we got some HUGE news.

I'm kinda proud of the campaign, so I'm going to brag for a paragraph or so. Feel free to skip to the huge news in the paragraph after the braggadocio.

We've finished among the top three fundraising schools in the nation for this campaign for - including this year - eight years now. In that time period, we've raised over two-hundred sixty-five thousand dollars from student bake sales, storefront collections, raffles, concerts, 5Ks, head shavings, cornhole tourneys, poker parties, matching grants, and all sorts of other stupid, juvenile stunts.

And this year...for the 2008 Pasta for Pennies campaign...we raised...

drum-roll please...

$46161.77

That's a new record for our school (only the second time we've crossed the $40K line) and totally destroyed our goal of $42,008 this year (for two thousand eight, get it?).

And even more excitedly, we finished as the...

#1 school in the nation

...this year.

Go ahead and read those last few lines again. Let them sink in. Let them percolate around in your brain and stick there for a while.

I'll wait...














Our students are awesome.

Their awesome is more awesome than your awesome.

Their awesome got together with their great and had a baby named amazing.

Their awesome smells like French toast.

French toast?

Their rockingness apologizes for making your awesome look pedestrian.

Honestly, big, major pride here - most of it because our students and staff work so hard, and we've finished in second place a whole lot of times, and it's really, really nice to finish first.

Admittedly, I wish we hadn't buried the competition (apparently winning by $10,000 over second place this year) because that means the LLS didn't get as much money this year as they could have, but I'll settle.

In the coolness of the announcements, Karen Taylor (rockin' Southern Ohio School & Youth coordinator) surprised me - and Calen, my campaign co-chair - with a bouquet of helium-filled balloons in the middle of my third-bell class. There was severe stunnage.

I gave the balloons out to my students because they did much of the work, raising more than $313 per person. I ended up with two unclaimed balloons, however, and tied them onto my belt, advertising our accomplishment to everyone I wandered past in the halls and being followed by my red balloon (and its mylar friend).

I felt like the kid in The Red Balloon...