Roughly 800 People ‘Jump’ at Chance for World Record at Blake Middle School [Video]

Students, faculty and staff filed in and out of the gymnasium Wednesday on a quest to break the Guinness World Record for most people doing jumping jacks in a 24-hour period.

The challenge, “Let’s Jump!” was presented by National Geographic Kids Magazine and inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign, “Let’s Move!” The campaign encourages kids and families to get healthy and active. The 24-hour challenge began at 3 p.m. on Oct. 11 on the White House lawn and concluded at 3 p.m. on Oct. 12.

“The program is to keep people moving,” said Sandy Spierdowis, Blake Middle School wellness teacher and event organizer in Medfield. “My main goal was to get the people and I say people because it is students and staff, to do something during the day to move. I think movement and being active is very important and we need to do more of that.”

Each grade level at Blake – sixth, seventh and eighth – consisted of roughly 250 students apiece, participated in the challenge, which began in Medfield at 11 a.m. and concluded at 11:57 a.m.

Each grade spent one full minute in the gym performing jumping jacks, which was tracked on the clock of the basketball scoreboard, with teachers, faculty and administrators joining students in the jump. Lane leaders and independent witnesses monitored the jumping jack sessions to ensure participants jumped for an entire minute and the challenge’s rules and regulations were being met.

“Now I send in all of our statistics and how many people did do it,” Spierdowis said at the conclusion of the challenge. “We had to have independent witnesses watching and sign off saying these people really did do the jumping jacks. All of it gets tabulated at National Geographic for Kids, that’s where I need to send the info.”

One of the greatest challenges Spierdowis faced in organizing the event was finding independent witnesses.

“An independent witness had to be somebody independent of the participants, of the location and independent of the host organization, which ruled out teachers, ruled out parents, that ruled out a lot of people,” Spierdowis said. “That’s how I ended up making contact with the police chief, Bob Meaney, he came in and he was a witness. I had a couple of friends that I play golf with and a couple of women from the Medfield Food Pantry. They were all lane leaders, so they were witness of a lane of 50 people jumping and they had to sign out a form for verification purposes that they did verify these people did one minute’s worth of jumping jacks.”

Spierdowis said she heard of the challenge through Blake’s Wellness Director and became interested in getting the Blake community involved.

“[Wellness director] e-mailed us awhile ago and said this [challenge] might be a fun thing to do and I said ‘this might be a fun thing to do’ and went ahead and got information and basically organized it and we did it [Wednesday],” Spierdowis said.

The current world record for the most people doing jumping jacks in 24 hours is 20,500, set last year. Spierdowis said she will send National Geographic Kids the statistics from Wednesday’s event and anxiously await the magazine’s reply as to whether Blake’s 800-plus participants will be part of a new world record.

“Hopefully we will have broken the record and we will get notification, a certificate, something that we can display in the school and T.A. Blake Middle School will be put into the Guinness Book of World Records,” Spierdowis said.

While the challenge was focused on setting a new world record, Spierdowis said she would participate in the program again because it got people in the Blake community enthusiastic about being active.

“If they do it again next year, we will give it a try,” Spierdowis said. “We’re anxious to see if we did beat it.”