School life / School egg drops · 2018 and 2023
Schools Keep Calling the Fire Department to Drop Eggs
In Connecticut, New Jersey and Bermuda, an elementary-school egg drop graduated from the roof to a fire truck. The crowd's request is always the same.
"Drop it, drop it!" That, according to UConn Today, was the request from the students of Goodwin Elementary School in Mansfield, Connecticut, on a Friday afternoon in September 2018. The occasion was the school's annual egg drop. Students had packed raw eggs into balloons, parachutes, bubble wrap and tight cardboard boxes. The University of Connecticut fire department, which the school sits about a mile from, put up its hook and ladder and dropped them.
By then the department had been helping for about 15 years. The enrichment teacher, Nancy Titchen, said the school had tried the drop from the top of its own building. It "doesn't have anywhere near the impact," she said, compared with the ladder truck.
I have read that sentence several times. Impact is the word you want for the excitement. It is also the exact word for what happens to the egg.
In October 2023, Northvail Elementary in New Jersey held its first PTA STEM fair. Part of it was an optional contest to build a structure that would protect an egg. The principal reported that firefighters dropped the entries from a fire-truck bucket above the school, in the rain.
In March 2024, in Bermuda, firefighters at the Port Royal Fire Station dropped eight devices built by students from Dalton E Tucker Primary School off the top of the station. The government's press release reports that the Minister of Education himself joined the students in chanting "drop that egg." He then congratulated "the four students whose devices survived."
The crowd wants the egg to survive. The crowd also wants the egg dropped from as high as possible. Nobody in the crowd sees a conflict.
Our middle one built an egg device last spring for a school project: a yogurt cup, a sock, four straws and an amount of tape I would describe as structural. We have no fire truck. We have a landing with a window over the back lawn. The eldest held the device out the window. The youngest stood on the lawn and shouted, without being taught, "Drop it!"
It landed. The tape held. The egg cracked. The middle one examined it for a long time and said it had cracked on the inside, which was the egg's fault, not the design's.
The dog ate the evidence.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- UConn Fire Department Adds Excitement to Elementary School Egg Drop, September 25, 2018 today.uconn.edu
- Bermuda government: Dalton E Tucker Primary STEM challenge, March 2024 gov.bm
- Northvail PTA Fall STEM Fair, October 2023 mts.pthsd.k12.nj.us