It has been a tradition at Morton West that during the week of homecoming, a Deco-door contest is held throughout the school where staff and students come together to decorate their classroom doors inspired by that year’s homecoming theme. Dustin Heap, Assistant Principal for the Freshman Academy and one of the admins organizing the event calls the contest an opportunity where “Students and teachers get to express their artistic side while promoting homecoming and our theme.” This year, teachers and students were challenged to produce a door design that perfectly captured the essence of the Wild West. This year’s Deco-Door contest winners were Ms. Amanda Del Blanco’s and Ms. Mary Beth Zerafa’s classes’ joint room decorations located in rooms W231 and W233. Their decoration incorporated humorous elements, such as a wanted help poster for a ranch hand and cutouts of students’ faces with mustaches pasted on them and cowboy hats on, into a western design.
Ms. Zerafa, a work program teacher at West, described the progress of coming up with the design as, “…just brainstorming ideas. Jackie Paramo is brilliant and came up with some ideas…and then we vote on them, and overwhelmingly, we decided that it should be like we’re hiring for the ranch kind of thing.”
Zerafa’s classroom door design has won 3rd place in the last two years, and this year she is overjoyed that her class has won the title prize. Being involved in the contest and winning means a lot to the teachers and students involved in this particular door design. Zerafa adds, “We work with students with special needs, and for them to be included in anything regarding homecoming is a big deal for them…we want to have it be so that every individual kid is a part of it, it’s not just, you know, one class or whatever.”
The details about the decoration door contest this year were communicated the week before homecoming and the entries were judged by Administrators and staff on Thursday, September 28. The Deco-door contest winners were given a pizza party to celebrate their victory and the doors were truly the best at Morton West.
