CAMDEN, S.C. — A friendly reading competition between Camden and Lugoff Middle Schools left students at Camden celebrating ... and reaping the rewards.
"We wanted to see who would read the most minutes, and our motivation is if our students won at Christmas time, they would get to shave principal Faulkenberry's head," said Camden Middle School Media Specialist Kathleen Durant.
The top 10 students from each grade with the most minutes of reading got to take a trimmer to Faulkenberry's hair.
Student A.J. Dennis says he's read around 200 minutes so far and he enjoyed getting the chance to trim the principal's hair. While Principal Faulkeberry was left with less hair, it was a school competition that made him smile.
"It's great, you know, just to see the students enjoying it," Principal Casey Faulkenberry said. "Something I can walk around during the day, and even students that didn't get to come in can still get a laugh out of it and put a smile on their face, but the biggest thing to me is just rewarding those students who put in their time of reading, and celebrating them. It's so important because that's just such an important life skill for them to develop."
The competition started at the beginning of the school year. Students at Camden Middle School have read a total of 865,000 minutes and plan to keep the reading competition going in the second half of the year.