Photo courtesy of Caroline Menke.
Yaphet Minter, the custodian at Crestline Elementary, and the fourth graders that surprised him with a pair of Air Force One tennis shoes, stand together for a photo on May 23.
One day Yaphet Minter got a phone call while working outside of his job as a custodian at Crestline Elementary School.
The school principal, Christy Christian, had asked him to come to the auditorium and he immediately got nervous, he said.
“I was like ‘Oh man, what’s going on now?’” Minter said.
Little did he know the entire 4th grade class, their teachers and Christian would be waiting for him with a big surprise.
As a token of appreciation from the class, specifically Crestline students Adams McKnight, Patterson Smith, Beau Dutton and Mac Mullis, Minter was given a pair of Air Jordan 7 PSG shoes, his favorite candy and a $100 gift card for his birthday.
When McKnight and friends came back to school for a new semester, they discovered there was a new custodian working in the 4th grade hall, he said.
“We started the new semester and we had a new janitor,” McKnight said. “The janitors are always really nice and they talk to us but this one was really, really nice and we observed that. He would always talk to us, he would show his sports cards and sometimes he’d give us candy. He was just really nice and we wanted to repay him.”
One day at school, McKnight and his friends were talking with Minter about what his favorite shoes were as well as his favorite candy. When he was carpooling with one of his friends, he said, they started to think about getting Minter something special for his birthday.
“We were like 'It would be so cool if we got him something,’” McKnight said. “We were kind of making up stuff because we knew it would never happen so that’s kind of where it started.”
The boys decided to go to Christian with their idea to see if gifting his favorite pair of shoes would be possible.
“They came into my office one morning and wanted to meet with me and said they had this idea,” Christian said. “At first I’m like ‘what? How are you going to do this?’ They said ‘no, we want to get the whole grade involved.’”
She said she told them they needed a plan to make this happen. They needed to figure out who their teacher sponsor would be, who the parent sponsor would be and how they would get the rest of the school involved as well as other details, she said.
They came back to Christian with answers to all of her questions. For two weeks, McKnight, Dutton, Smith and Mullis sold cookies and lemonade through stands on the sidewalk, McKnight said.
The only job Christian had, she said, was to figure out what size shoe Minter wears.
When they raised the money and ordered the shoes with the help of Stephanie Smith, Patterson Smith’s mother, they were anxious to know when the shoes had arrived, her husband said.
“I can’t overstate how everyday they were trying to figure out if the shoes were there yet,” said Houston Smith, Patterson’s father and Stephanie’s husband.
When Crestline Elementary School’s 4th grade class finally came up with money before they went on summer vacation, they were eager to give Minter his gifts.
“My three guys (Dutton, Smith and McKnight) give me a little speech and said ‘Hey, Mr. Minter, we've got something for you and the next thing you know, they gave me a gift,” he said. “I opened it up, and it’s a pair of Air Jordans. It was unbelievable that these kids did something like that.”
