“Come to the fair” is a well-known lyric from the song that is sung each year during the annual County Fair Morning Ex, a beloved Parker tradition. Parker however, like many schools, is faced with the challenge of COVID-19 and how to adapt many long-standing traditions throughout the year, like County Fair. 

For the 2020-2021 school year, County Fair has been postponed to March of 2021. County Fair is a tradition that gathers the entire Parker Community including faculty, staff, students, and parents. The Fair has booths from different grades, providing food, games and activities for the school. Traditionally, 10th graders are the organizers and planners of County Fair, assisted by sophomore grade heads Math teacher Vicki Lee and History teacher Andrew Bigelow.

In years past, the planning for County Fair had to be finished by October, as it was the month County Fair was held. “Normally Ms. Lee and I work like five or six days over the summer, preparing and getting all of the vendors in place, contracts out, bills paid,” Bigelow said. “Sending emails out to all the different grades heads, all the different teachers, and faculty and staff, coordinating with maintenance, security, administration, and then when school starts, it’s all about meeting, meeting, meeting with the sophomores, the County Fair heads. We rely heavily on them.”

Postponing County Fair created more time to plan. “We moved it to March so we have more time to figure out what’s happening, and to hopefully be at a point where we are in Phase five where we can have a bigger group of people that are assembling, because right now I think we’d only have 50 people,” Lee said. “So we’re going to have to become creative and see how things go as we get closer to the date. We are trying to be really flexible with that.” Having the Fair be virtual was not explored. “We did not really consider that as a viable possibility,” Lee said. “It can’t be virtual because, like what would you watch? You could watch the first graders sing, but everything else is interactive, and it’s kids playing games.” 

“If things aren’t even substantially different, it would be like a social distanced one,” 2020-2021 County Fair head Rania Jones said. 

Having County Fair be postponed for five months can create new opportunities with more time. “I think the opportunity of actually having the sophomores have more time to think about it, and you know those what ifs, like, wouldn’t it be great if we do this for County Fair, wouldn’t it be great if we did this. A lot of times we already have everything so far in place by the time these ideas come to kids, and we’re not able to implement them,” Lee said. “We’re hoping that we’ll get some more inspirations from kids on how to do things that we’ll be able to implement because now we have time.” 

Bigelow explains that more time could benefit new teachers because they will have time to experience the essence of the school.

Along with County Fair comes the County Fair Morning Ex, which highlights what activities or food each grade will be responsible for. Each grade contributes to the Morning Ex by presenting skits, videos or any creative way to present their booth. Along with the extra time for planning the postponed event provides, “It gives people time to plan a really good skit for the County Fair Morning Ex,” Bigelow said. “It gives people time to prep and plan whatever booth they are going to run.”

Having more time doesn’t mean that different aspects of the school year can’t change. “So now it will be very different when we spend a year putting it together but at the same time spending a year putting it together not knowing how it really is going to look,” Bigelow said.

County Fair is a unique and annual tradition at Parker, adding yet another theme to the record. “County Fair is basically, we are putting on basically a party for the entire school community. And it is something kids look forward to, I think faculty and staff and parents look forward to it, but I know kids from JK through senior year. I know so many kids who love it, enjoy it, and it’s really one of the greatest community builders, and it’s a great opportunity for all of us as any entire community to come together,” Bigelow said. 

The outcome of County Fair cannot be entirely foreseen in advance, but being open-minded can help make the shift to March easier. “As long as everyone is flexible and patient, and accommodating, we’ll make something good happen.” Bigelow said.