‘As loud as a metal concert’: Teachers wore earplugs for raucous Sacajawea Middle School tradition

The annual Rubber Thunderbird competition reached new decibels Friday in its 26th year at Sacajawea Middle School, as two new components shook up the last day of school spirit rivalry.

The same raucous screams, costume-clad students and enthusiastic staff were in line with past years, but the spacious gym freshly built this year is a stark contrast from what staffers describe as the “sweaty” 60-year-old space it replaced.

Also a first, roughly 280 screams added to the mass that broke in the new gym, the class of sixth-graders who joined the ranks of middle schoolers at the South Hill school this year.

The roughly 1,000 students compete by grade level to be the most school-spirited, a metric measured by screaming, dancing, playing games against each other and following directions from staff.

Each grade wears a different shade of neon, donning hard hats and high-visibility safety vests in accordance with their construction-themed dress code. Their neons were as blinding as their screams were deafening.

Students and staff spent three hours in the gym, as near-constant preteen screams or blasting music echoed off the new gym’s walls. Much like an actual construction site, some staff wore ear plugs in anticipation of the racket audible outside the school.

Sixth-grader Roslyn Butler was nervous to start middle school, anxious about getting lost between classes and worried she wouldn’t make friends. Promises of a “crazy” last day “as loud as a metal concert” eased some of her worries.

“We’ve been talking about it since, like, the beginning of the year,” Roslyn said, linking arms with sixth-grader Zoë Adams, each dressed in neon orange, the color assigned to their grade.

“It’s overwhelming, but it’s a lot of fun,” Zoë said. “I’m going to sleep really good tonight.”

Some staff wear T-shirts proclaiming Friday as the “Best. Last. Day. Ever.” but Zoë took it a step further.

“This is, like, my favorite school year ever,” she said, not just because of the eardrum-bursting finale, but also due to new friends, like Roslyn, understanding teachers and classes like orchestra.

The two are already eager for seventh grade, no longer scared to be thunderbirds.

Across the gym, eighth-graders Autumn Jamison and Nevaeh William prepare to make a similar transition to Lewis and Clark High School.

Having competed in Rubber Thunderbird last year as seventh-graders, or “sevies,” as the kids say, the two have differing opinions on the new additions.

Sharing the space with younger peers makes Nevaeh feel like she’s in elementary school, she said. She also misses last year’s eighth-graders, eager to reunite at Lewis and Clark next year, she says as teacher Jessica Davies frantically sprints by wearing a saggy chicken costume.

She’s up next in the program to lead the chicken dance, and she panics over the faulty fan that should inflate her costume. In the nick of time, it works, and she squeezes her bulbous, inflated costume through a gym door frame to dance like a chicken in front of her pupils for the sixth year in a row.

The sixth-graders added to the volume of the event, which was music (or screams) to Autumn’s ears.

“It makes the Rubber Thunderbird more fun because it’s louder and everything,” Autumn said. “We can do more cheers, like eighth-graders were going, ‘We love sevies’ and the sevies were going ‘We love sixth-graders.’ ”

The multigenerational screams of affirmation are critical to the tradition in building camaraderie across the school.

“It’s important because I think you should be nice to everyone,” said eighth-grader Rees Page. “So that kind of helps teach you.”

The support doesn’t go unnoticed among sixth-graders, the cheering a punctuation mark on what sixth-grader Destiny Haro said was an uplifting year.

“I expected it to be more scary,” Destiny said. “But everybody welcomes us.”