Here's the scoop: Kids aiming high

Eisenhower Junior High School dreams big — we're talking Guinness-size proportions, as in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The Taylorsville school is already home to:

• The world's fastest human conveyor belt, a 100-student line that rolled along to transfer an object in two minutes.

• The world's longest balloon chain — 708 feet — made in one hour.

• The world's largest paper clip chain, stretching 22.17 miles.

• And the one that started it all — the world's largest loaf of bread ever baked, at 307 pounds (thanks to a Hercules oven used to cook missile casings) in 1987.

Now, on Monday afternoon, students hope to create the "world's tallest ice cream cone made in 20 minutes."

Maybe someday they'll set the world record for school world records.

"They're driven — or maybe they're addicted, I don't know," geography teacher Clayton Brough, also a local TV station's weathercaster, said of his students. "They got themselves into it really gung-ho last year . . . it just got larger and larger and larger in scope."

The record-setters have a direct line into the record-bookers — ninth-grader Valerie Burgoyne has "called Guinness more than any student I know," Brough says. They're now working with the Book of Alternative World Records in Germany on the ice cream cone feat.

They've learned the tricks of the trade, too. If Guinness doesn't want to play on one of its world record attempts, the students will call the AWR organization, and vice versa, sort of playing the two off each other, Brough said.

Now they want to spread the joy to kids across the globe and help others create one for the record books.

The students in Eisenhower's gifted and talented program established the World Records for Schools Web site (www.worldrecordsforschools.org), a sort of "how-to" for coordinating and certifying world records "related to amazing, outstanding and unique achievements by students and schools."

The site, up since January, has received a grant from the Granite Education Foundation and is working to secure other financial support. It also is able to certify world records by student groups.

World Records for Schools lists a slew of record possibilities for students, plucked from the Guinness books dating from 1990 to the present, the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" books and the Alternative Book of World Records, ninth-grader Nikole Clements said. Each is a safe, group-friendly feat — think popping, rather than chomping, as many bags of snack chips as possible. There are even categories for students as young as 5 years old.

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