Halloween Carnival

Refreshments table, before donations.
I loved the Purell bottle! The student's
idea, not mine.

Very soon after the school year started, the kids asked me if we would be doing a Halloween carnival. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I told them yes, we'd probably do whatever they had done in the past. If I'd realized that I'd be the one responsible for doing it, I might not have agreed so quickly!

Having the responsibility for staging an event with a history is a delicate matter of balancing how it was done in the past and how logic dictates it should be done. Some concerns are easily ignored, like the suggestion that tickets needed to be red because that's the color they were last year. Other concerns have to be carefully considered. I found some flyers from last year, so I knew the event ran for 3 hours last year. I also knew from, hmm, let's say unsolicited advice from the community, that there were spans of time when nothing was happening. I also heard that some of the games, which are run by the secondary students, had no one attending them.

I wanted the kids to be responsible for putting on the carnival, but also accountable for how it turned out. I cut the hours back to 2. I also refused to have more games and activities than we had people to run them. I made signs that had the name of each game and the name of the student running it. Any student who wasn't at their station would be known by all to be shirking. I had 2 floaters to relieve the kids running the games so that they could play the other games. I changed the way we voted for "Best Costumes," so that everyone got to vote, but I limited the prizes to one in each age category: Child, Youth, Adult.

The kids were part of every decision, whether I made it or we decided as a group. They did all the actual labor in setting up and tearing down the carnival. The student in charge of refreshments baked all the cookies and cakes, made the popcorn, and kept the coffee coming. Some members of the community donated baked goods for the refreshments, along with prizes for the Cake Walk. I encouraged the kids to think of different ways to decorate, that we didn't have to do things the way they'd been done before. I also demanded a higher standard of appearance, like covering tables with paper in black, yellow, purple, or orange, rather than having bare furniture.

I'd say the event was a success. Many of the elders came, although they didn't play the games. They brought things for the Cake Walk, bought game tickets that they distributed to the younger kids, and then sat and watched the community as a whole have fun. When it was time to pull a ticket for the Split-the-Pot raffle, I asked the oldest of the elders to do the honors. We earned something like $350. Next year, we'll do some things differently, but I know what I'm getting into! Now the parents are asking about a Christmas pageant!