Feels Like Quest Spirit

It must be October. Everywhere you turn, you see the word spirit. Local High Schools are celebrating Homecoming and hosting spirit days, Spirit Halloween has taken up residence in retailers everywhere and here at Quest, we devote an entire week to the word. For our school, Spirit Week is four “themed” days, culminating with an admissions Open House and Fall Festival. What sets Quest apart from other school spirit events is quite simple. Here, the students run the show.

This year, our eldest students went a step beyond the different daily themes, working hard to create experiences that would elevate our commitment to establishing bonds between different classrooms. They revived the “Questaraunt,” to serve breakfast to our Elementary students, read stories to our Primary classrooms and led the school in a color parade. On Friday, they created a “day of positivity” by leaving surprise messages of inspiration on student’s lockers and staff desks and then served as group leaders on our field trip to Clark Farm, where the students traipsed through a corn maze, raced each other on the zip-line, careened down the slide and shot corn out of a cannon.

Becoming a Quest Middle Schooler means a lot: a different classroom, different teachers, and different, often long-awaited, responsibilities. Quest kids know that Middle School organizes and leads Spirit Week, and they look forward to “earning their turn” for years. For several weeks, our intrepid seventh and eighth graders met with the administration and teaching staff to map out their different ideas for a week designed to “pump up” their peers, and to create an exciting, fun-filled Fall Festival showcasing our school. All the planning and preparation paid off, Spirit Week 2018 was a great success.

At our Open House, our students served as ambassadors to our attending families offering tours and answering questions. They also had a starring role in the Fall Festival: operating the cider press for fresh beverages, recruiting children for a scavenger hunt, setting up groups for three-legged and sack races, playing giant twister with the Primary students and managing their microbusiness table selling Narrow River candles.

As we were leaving Clark Farms on Friday, an employee shared that they look forward to our visit each year. She commented that the staff always enjoy watching the 7^thand 8^thgraders lead the younger students, managing to have a tremendous amount of fun while still being well-behaved and polite. Quest teachers hear this every time we take our children anywhere….and it never grows old. We couldn’t be prouder of how our students represent the school, and what being part of our spirited community means. Many schools promote the idea of “whole child education,” but at Quest we truly make it a priority.