End-of-the-Year Celebration

It’s never too early to begin thinking about an end-of-year celebration. I must admit, initially I had serious doubts about the work vs. benefit balance. It was and still is a lot of work and although scheduling the event, coordinating the food, tracking the RSVP’s, soliciting donations, organizing the student awards, and carrying out the evening’s festivities are a party planners dream; these tasks coupled with a full teaching load can push a teacher to the breaking point. Advanced planning is the key to a successful experience that will leave your students wanting more and the community asking how they can help in future years.
Whether it be Geometry in Construction or another type of contextual program, the end of year banquet provides several benefits to the program including a valuable time to honor the students in front of their parents and the community. Second, the banquet will provide an opportunity to recognize any business partnerships (However big or small they may be) and also any key school/community members.
Here are the things that you can do now to prepare for the banquet.

• Find a location and get it on the school calendar. We use the school cafeteria which we annually fill to capacity at just over 500 people. It does not have to occur the last week of school. We have always scheduled ours for 2-3 weeks before the end of the year. This avoids the graduation/end of year activities. We prefer it to be on a weeknight from 5:30-8:00 pm.

• Send out the date to all your student’s parents. Do this several times throughout the year so that families can “Save the Date”. Also, invite all of your school administration and key community members. Again, remind them of the date often.

• Send out the date to all business sponsors. Remind them a month before the actual banquet.

• Begin to have those feelers out for inexpensive food. We buy pizza and salad (or something similar) to serve as dinner for the crowd. Any portion of this that you can have donated is a plus.

• If you have a potential buyer for the house/project, be sure to invite them…even if they are a potential buyer for next year’s project. The event provides a great opportunity to market your project. Include the local media in the invite.

• If you have student aides….or management team members, be sure they clear the calendar for 2-3 hours before and after for set-up and clean-up.

• Make a class list of all your students. On this list record any funny happenings, etc as you go through the year. We give each student an award at the banquet. The awards can be on a certificate or some inexpensive item that represents the award. The local “Everything’s a Dollar” store gets a lot of our business. Awards include hardest worker, best at drywall, roofing, etc, most improved math student as well as some funny awards such as “It’s too cold to work” or “measure once and cut twice”. We try to keep the awards in a positive light. Sometimes these awards are done in groups such as the “best plumbers” or “willing to tackle anything” awards. Keep a list of the highlights of each student. Do not wait until the week before the banquet to come up with all the awards.

• Be sure to take photos. Get group shots as well as individual. We have 2 digital cameras that we have running in every construction class. We select 2 students to be photographer of the day. The students selected as photographer changes daily. If you keep the same photographer, you will get photos of the same students. We ask that students take photos of only students that are working. Also, be sure that you take some of the math classroom. Download these photos once every couple of weeks, and sort through them getting rid of any poor quality photos or inappropriate ones. You can choose a student to do this if you think they can exercise good judgment.
We hope this gives you a little insight into planning the big event. Make records of the banquet so that you do not have to recreate the whole thing next year from scratch…as I know that once you have done it once, you will make it a cornerstone of your program.