By By Tim Cottrell
United Bank is rocking the night away.
After the success of last year's rocking chair contest, the bank is once again holding the contest for the benefit of the PTA of local schools.
The bank has provided unfinished rocking chairs to 22 different schools in the communities it is a part of, and students will compete to see who does the best job decorating them. The competition is open to students in fifth grade or below.
"We started out with all the schools in our coverage area," Temple Hayles, Marketing Director for United Bank, said. "There were 40-something schools and we said that the first 20 to respond would get a chair to decorate. We actually wound up taking 22 schools."
The students received the chairs earlier this month and will have all month to decorate them before turning them returning in April.
Hayles then talked about the benefit to the schools the contest would provide.
"We're going to have judges from the art program at Alabama Southern, Jefferson Davis, and Faulkner State," Hayles said. "They'll be judging all the different rocking chairs in April. The winning school gets $1,000 donated to its PTA (Parent Teacher Association). The second place gets $500 and the third place gets $250."
Hayles said last year's contest was too successful to not continue.
"Everyone was coming up to us and asking us if we would be doing it again," Hayles said. "We got so much positive feedback we had to. This year we don't have a theme, we're just letting the students do what they want with the chairs. Last year, we tried to have a theme, but they wound up doing their own thing anyway."
According to a United Bank press release, the chairs are meant to symbolize "comfort in the ever-changing world we live in". The bank keeps rocking chairs in its offices to symbolize that very fact.
The press release also states that the program shows "United Bank's commitment to our children, because after all, they are our future".