Pevely Elementary School recently set a new world record.
After students and staff collected thousands of boxes of macaroni and cheese, 11,936 of them were lined up in the school and knocked down in domino fashion, setting a Guiness World Record for “the most packaged food items toppled in a domino fashion,” said Hallie Cheney, a third grade special education teacher who helped organize the event.
She said the school held the official record attempt on March 29 when students were off school for spring break because of all the restrictions and requirements to set a Guinness World Record.
“You can only have a certain amount of people here helping; otherwise there’s more stipulations because it’s considered a mass participation event,” she said.
Independent witnesses were on hand for verification at the world record-breaking attempt. From left are Sharon Shaffer and Kenzie King from the city of Pevely and Officer Cox from the Pevely Police Department.
Cheney said other rules included counting the boxes three times for verification, having independent witnesses on site to verify the count and having all the boxes visible from one camera shot.
She said it took more than two hours for helpers to place all the boxes, and just 2 minutes and 31 seconds for them to fall. They were placed four boxes wide over a span of 790 feet through the halls of the elementary school and ending in the gym.
Pevely Elementary Principal Katie Dunlap said the school had only one attempt to break the record. If the boxes stopped falling partway through, they were not allowed to start it up again, but instead would only be allowed to count the boxes that initially fell.
Luckily, every box fell on the first attempt.
Cheney said she still has to submit paperwork and documentation to Guinness World Records before the title becomes official, but in the meantime, the school will celebrate by giving all students an extra recess.
“Our kids have worked so hard on this. We’re definitely going have a school celebration for everyone involved,” Dunlap said.
Before setting the world record, a trial run was held on March 27, when Pevely Elementary school students, dressed in yellow or royal blue, celebrated “Mac and Cheese Day” and the school’s upcoming attempt to break the world record.
For the trial run, 5,000 boxes of macaroni and cheese were lined up in the school’s hallways, and they were successfully toppled, Dunlap said.
She said the previous world record was 4,000 boxes, so the school set an initial goal of collecting 5,000 boxes for their attempt at the record.
She said the school started collecting boxes in February and within the first week, had collected more than 1,000 boxes, receiving donations from students, parents, community members and local businesses, as well as some from outside the Jefferson County area.
Dunlap said Pevely City Hall and Police Department collected for the event as well.
Some cash was donated, too, and the school used it to buy boxes of macaroni.
Dunlap said the project provided learning opportunities for students.
“A lot of our teachers have been doing different things with macaroni, like either using the shells to count with or create art-type projects with them,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that we’ve done with math. We’ve talked about estimating how many noodles do you think are in a box and how many boxes could we fit from here to the gym and that kind of stuff.”
Dunlap said the district’s “Blackcats Give Back Day” was April 20, and at that time the macaroni boxes were packaged up and delivered to area food pantries.
Cheney said Pevely students enjoyed the project.
“They’ve loved it. They have been extremely excited and invested,” she said. “We do weekly updates on how many boxes we have, and they’ve been totally pulled in and excited from the beginning.”