At Marlboro High School, the Battle of the Classes (BOTC) is one of the most anticipated events of the school year. Each grade elects a team of seven boys and seven girls to represent their grade in the events. Before the actual event, there are opportunities for each grade to earn points for their class. This includes t-shirt sales, penny wars, theme day, spirit week, and “finding the mustang.” Each grade’s team designs a t-shirt that the rest of the class has the opportunity to purchase and can wear to BOTC. This year, the freshman class sold the most t-shirts. Penny wars is held during lunch the week before BOTC. Each grade has a bucket and students can put pennies into their grade’s bucket to add points for their class and they can put silver coins into other grade’s buckets to take points away from those grades. The sophomores won penny wars. Theme day is when the teams dress up for the school day with a theme they have chosen. The teams work very hard on their costumes and this year, the juniors came out on top. Spirit week was a new addition this year. The class that had the most people dress up for spirit week won. The seniors won this. Finally, there was “find the mustang.” A paper mustang is hidden somewhere throughout the school. The teams are given clues as to where it is and the team that finds it first wins. The senior class found the mustang first this year. So, going into the night of BOTC, the rankings were seniors in first, followed by freshman, sophomores, and then juniors.

At Marlboro High School, BOTC takes place on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The event is made up of many different competitions for the teams to do, including the scooter race, egg toss, a relay race, jenga, tug of war, and mor. For the scooter race, the seniors came in first, the juniors were second, followed by the sophomores in third, and the freshman in fourth. Then, the egg toss had an interesting result this year. It was down to one senior pair and one junior pair, when both eggs broke. So, they redid the toss and the seniors won. Finally, each team performs a dance that they have prepared. They are usually very silly and are definitely a favorite part of the event. The final results for BOTC 2024 were the sophomores in fourth place, the freshman in third, the juniors in second, and the seniors in first. This year’s seniors also won as juniors last year, so it was a back to back win for them.