Schools earn money in lottery game
<p>Priest River Elementary staff members race to scratch as many lottery tickets as possible in the Scratch For Schools competition. (Photo by CAMERON RASMUSSON)</p>
PONDERAY — Good-natured teachers turned into ticket-scratching machines Wednesday night in an effort to bring in cash for their school.
Idaho Lottery officials and regional school representatives gathered at the Holiday Inn Express for an event called Scratch For Schools. This brisk competition challenged teachers to scratch as many lottery tickets as possible within a five-minute period. Once the dust settled, the Idaho Lottery had distributed $4,477 to 20 regional schools.
“The Idaho Lottery was created to benefit public schools, and this is one way we do that,” Idaho Lottery public information specialist David Workman said.
The Wednesday event was the eighth out of nine separate competitions across Idaho, with this particular scratch-off being the largest. Twenty schools signed up to participate in the competition, with 60 teachers and administrators participating in total.
The rules of the game are simple. Each school’s team members, some of whom wore elaborate costumes, split up a pack of 500 lottery tickets — specifically, the new “Bookworm Bucks” tickets not yet in mass circulation. At Workman’s signal, the teams then scrambled to scratch as many of those tickets as possible within five minutes. Each school got to keep whatever winnings they acquired from their scratched tickets.
The tickets covered a wide range of values, with the highest winners ranking at $50, $100, and the ultra-rare $500. In the previous seven iterations of the scratch-off this year, no one had landed a $500 ticket, but that changed this week. Priest River Education Program staff were the lucky winners of the $500 ticket — a prize Workman estimated was about one in 275,000 — making them the most lucrative scratchers in the statewide competition with $640 total.
While they won the most money, they didn’t make the top three teams for the number of tickets scratched. Those honors went to Priest River Junior high in first place and $537 won, Boundary County Middle School in second and $322 won and Forrest Bird Charter School in third with $325 won.
The full list of participating schools includes Boundary County Middle School, Clark Fork High School, Farmin Stidwell Elementary, Idaho Hill Elementary, Kootenai Elementary, Naples Elementary, Mount Hall Elementary, Lakeland High School, Northside Elementary, Priest River Education Program, Priest Lake Elementary, Priest River Elementary, Priest River Junior High School, Priest River Lamanna High School, Sagle Elementary, Forrest Bird Charter School (previously Sandpoint Charter School), Southside Elementary, Valley View Elementary, Washington Elementary and Hope Elementary.