Greenville Elementary School students are going for gold.

On Friday, the school held opening ceremonies for the GES Academic Olympics — a competition focusing on academics, attendance, behavior and parental involvement.

“After meeting with teachers, students, and parents during the summer, my notes indicated a few areas to direct our focus as a school,” said first-year principal Kent McNaughton. “We thought it would be fun to work on these areas by forming teams and making it a competition. Some of the staff wanted to have a kick off to the competition with each class creating a state name, a state flag, and a class chant. This idea led to the GES Academic Olympics since it also related to our school motto for this year, “Bring them in, teach them up, send them out into the world!”

According to McNaughton, gold, silver and bronze medal winners for each grade level will be recognized each nine weeks. The last nine weeks the school will recognize the medal winners for that grading period and medal winners for the school year.

Students will earn points in the academic portion of the competition based on meeting goals set for each student in Accelerated Reader and the grades earned by each student on report cards.

The attendance component is determined by daily attendance and tardies to school, while the behavior component is based on number of office referrals. Teams lose points if one of their students is sent to the office.

McNaughton said the parent involvement portion of the competition is aimed at having more parents attend school events and to encourage parents to volunteer at the school.

“The goal is to build a family environment at GES that prepares the students for the 21st century while having fun reaching our goal,” McNaughton said.