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South Valley Riverton Journal

Seniors Pull Off Class Prank With Balloons

Aug 04, 2015 10:45AM ● By Bryan Scott

12,000 Balloons

By Aimee L. Cook

South Valley - Herriman High seniors Natalie Barker and Tyler Martinez put their thinking caps on before their graduation caps at the end of the school year. Both wanted to pull off something fun and memorable but with zero damage to the school. When the idea of balloons came up, they decided they had a winner. Figuring they would need at least 10,000 blown up latex balloons to make an impression, they then had to find out a way to pay for them. 

“Mickey Rosqvist helped me out by sending out text messages to every senior we could think of,” Martinez said. “We informed the students what we wanted to do and told them it would cost around $5 to $10 per person. After we got enough people to get on board we ordered the balloons through Amazon and then emptied two Wal-Mart locations of all their latex balloons. In total we had just a little over 12,000 balloons.”

Upon arrival of the balloons, the seniors would need to call upon others to get the thousands of balloons blown up and transported to the school. They gathered at Tanesha Bland’s house where the group inflated the balloons using an air compressor. For two days they blew up balloons: some filled them while others had the job of tying them. Trailers were provided by Ashton Adams and Bland to transport the balloons to the school. 

“We spent two days blowing up the balloons and the night before we dumped them in the school. We were up until about 2 a.m. to finish them,” Martinez said. “We knew that the doors would be open to the school at 5 a.m. on the day we planned to deliver them so, running off less than three hours of sleep, we woke up to take them to school. We pulled the trailers up to the back and began taking industrial bags full of the balloons into the building. We had people filling the bags in the trailers and some grabbing the bags and dumping them in the school. It took us about an hour to get all of them into the school. The janitors were the first to see them and to our surprise they found it pretty amusing.”

As students and faculty arrived at school and heard about the sea of balloons, they just had to stop to look. The preschool children had fun running through them and students and faculty took a minute to snap a photo or two. 

“Before class started the student body popped all of them and our commons floor was covered in over 12,000 popped balloons,” Tyler said. “As sad as it was to see our work be destroyed, it made it a lot easier to clean up. It was so much fun. I really enjoyed being a part of the first real senior prank at Herriman High School. Everyone who helped make it happen said they were glad they were a part of it.”