The students of Indian Creek schools will march through Trafalgar to their school campus in a parade through town.
Indian Creek High School student athletes will join the parade, starting at their old elementary school on Pearl Street. Elementary school students will help decorate their school’s float.
More than 70 classic cars will ride through town in the parade, before they are parked and their hoods are lifted to show off their torque in a classic car show.
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The seventh annual Music at the Creek is Saturday and is expected to raise about $5,000 for the NHJ Educational Foundation. The foundation will use the money raised to dole out grants to teachers who have an idea for a hands-on special project they want to do in their classrooms.
Organizers tout the festival as a slice of community, a way to bring together families who live in Morgantown, Nineveh and Trafalgar, which make up the consolidated school district of Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson.
Morgantown residents celebrate Col. Vawter with a Col. Vawter Day festival in September. Nineveh residents join together on Halloween to throw toilet paper around their town.
Trafalgar residents do not have a festival all their own and Music at the Creek is the only festival with the expressed purpose of bringing together all the communities to raise money and celebrate the schools, Heather Hart, president of the NHJ Educational Foundation, said.
“The school district really does link all of the towns together,” she said. “Typically our communities all kind of mesh because of the school district being a common denominator.”
The educational foundation was formed in 2011 and Music at the Creek is the largest and first fundraiser for the foundation, which has about a $22,000 operating budget, Hart said.
Early organizers of the festival wanted a way to raise money for the educational foundation and a way to bring together the three main communities that feed into the school district, said Kelly Ankney, foundation secretary.
The first festival in 2012 had a few vendors. Bit by bit and every year, features have been added to make it the large event that encompassed the whole community, Hart said.
A car show was added. More vendors began to register. The festival now kicks off with a parade. Students compete in a farmer’s Olympics and participate in other games. Local bands play all day.
“It has finally been around long enough that people just know that it is here finally,” Ankney said. “I think we have finally just have gotten a lot of community involvement.”
Local school groups participate, with FFA grilling up pork chops, the robotics team doing a demonstration and the special education department sponsoring a booth at the festival.
“A lot of school groups, it is an avenue for them to make something, sell something to raise money,” Hart said.
People are also drawn to the festival because all of the money earned from car and craft vendor registrations and parking and game fees gets funneled right back into the classroom, said Jennifer Skobel, seventh grade social studies teacher at Indian Creek Middle School.
“(The money) is staying in our community,” she said. “They know it is going right back to the kids.”
Grants that the festival money has funded included STEM projects at all school levels and explore hands-on projects, Skobel said.
“With these grants we are able to provide those extras to them and to provide above and beyond that classroom,” she said.
Part of the success of the festival is that it unites the small communities around one cause and takes the entire community to pull off, Skobel said.
“With the small community we are in, it affects so many of us and our kids, everyone is taking part in it now,” she said.
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What: Music at the Creek
When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. A parade kicks off at 10:30 a.m. at the old elementary school.
Where: Indian Creek High School, 803 Indian Meadows Drive, Trafalgar.
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