Principal hits the roof after students hit goal

The temperature hit a brisk 45 degrees Thursday night in Chaffee, Missouri. But Sid Atkins, Chaffee Elementary School principal, wasn’t bothered. His sleeping bag and his tent with a dinosaur print kept him warm as he slept on the school’s roof.

His campout was part of a promise he made to his first- through sixth graders at the beginning of the year: If they passed 7,000 Accelerated Reader tests in the first quarter, he would spend a night on the roof.

By Oct. 14, the last day of the first quarter, the 320 Chaffee Elementary students had passed 7,008 tests, meaning each student read an average of nearly 22 books in the first 10 weeks of class.

“That’s a pretty good amount,” Atkins said.

The students, he said, thought the goal seemed lofty, not realizing it was on par with their progress in past years.

The first quarter, he said, tends to start slow — students take some time to determine their reading levels before starting the Accelerated Reader program in earnest.

But throughout the quarter, he said, there was more than one occasion when the students would take and pass more than 800 tests in one day.

And so, around 9 p.m. Thursday, Atkins quietly went to the elementary school to set up camp. His wife and children helped him get his supplies up the ladder, then returned home. Though there was no one on the roof with him, Atkins was not alone.

“I did have three children who live here close by come out and said good night, said my name — hollered it — and then their dad texted me to see if I heard it,” he said.

The next morning, Atkins sat in a chair on the roof and waved to students and teachers as they arrived. The school, on its Facebook page, encouraged everyone to honk when they saw him. Students, he said, bombarded him with questions.

“Did you really stay up there all night?”

Yes.

“Were you cold?”

No.

“How did you go to the bathroom?”

He had a ladder to climb down in emergencies.

If the students thought 7,000 was a lofty goal for the first quarter, the 10,000 goal for the second quarter might sound impossible. But Atkins is confident they can do it. And when they do, he and his assistant principal, Jennifer Vandeven, will jump into a cold swimming pool on the playground in January.

Having participated in the Special Olympics Polar Plunge event in the past, Atkins is not worried.

“The year I did it, they had to chip away ice so we had a spot to jump in,” he said. “So it’s OK.”

Atkins is proud of the work his students have put forth, and looks forward to the second quarter results.

“We’re excited. I hope they reach it, I really do,” Atkins said. “They do the hard part. What I do is the easy part.”

bbrown@semissourian.com

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408 Elliott, Chaffee Mo.