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Mary Giella Elementary staffers get doused in green slime

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By KLINT LOWRY | The Suncoast News

Published: May 30, 2009

SHADY HILLS - Mary Giella Elementary School students sat in an enormous circle around the school's central courtyard May 22, cheering and chanting. It was the last day before the Memorial Day weekend, but they were reveling in a private school holiday of their own making: "Slime Day."

The cheering got louder as Principal Katie Lail, assistant principal Kathy Kaburis and media specialist Terri Falk came out into the center of the courtyard wearing plastic rain ponchos. A downpour was coming - for the three of them anyway - as the three took their seats and waited for gallons of green slime to be dumped over their heads.

This was all Falk's doing, Lail and Kaburis good-naturedly grumbled a few minutes earlier as they prepared in the school media center. A smiling Falk agreed, as she happily explained that the students had earned their Slime Day spectacle.

All year long, the school has been participating in the Accelerated Reader program. A common tool in elementary schools, the program keeps track of how much students are reading. Students can choose from a selection of fiction and nonfiction books. After reading they take quizzes based on the books. Each book read is worth a given number of points based on its length and level of difficulty.

At the beginning of the year, Falk issued a challenge: if the students could collectively accrue 15,000 points by the end of the year, she would kiss a pig.

"Well, by the end of the third quarter, they already had 15,000 points," Falk said. Lail and Kaburis raised the stakes, vowing to also kiss the pig if the students could reach 20,000 points.

As of May 22, the students had accumulated 21,747 points, and the trio was fully prepared to pay the price and pucker up to the porker. Unfortunately, the pig backed out. Actually, it was the pig's owner, Falk said. The potbellied pig was a pet, and the owner was worried that with all the recent concern over swine flu, if anyone happened to get sick afterward, the pig would be blamed.

Actually, substituting the slime shower had its advantages. Before the dousing, students who had done exceptionally well on the reading challenge received medallions.

Fifth-grader Emily Ritchie, who single-handedly earned 700 points, and second-grader Chelsea Wilds, who led all early grade students, got the rare privilege of dumping gallons of slime over their principal's and assistant principal's heads.

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