Models strut down the runway, showing off their shoes. Each shoe reflects the style of their designers, who have been hard at work over the past month to get their footwear ready for fashion week.

But this show wasn’t in New York or Paris. Instead, this fashion show took place last week in Heritage Academy. And instead of working with conventional materials, the designers – fifth and sixth graders – could only use newspapers and tape to bring their visions to life.

Vonda Winter, elementary principal for Heritage Academy, helped to judge the students’ work during the fashion show on Oct. 15-17. She said the project showcased the “remarkable creativity, talent and ingenuity of our students.”

“Using only newspaper and Scotch tape, they designed, constructed and presented their original shoe creations with exceptional style and confidence,” Winter said in a written statement. “At Heritage Academy, we are exceedingly proud of the way our students embraced this unique and unconventional challenge, demonstrating both academic excellence and artistic innovation.”

Lisa Naugher, elementary STEM enrichment teacher, said she found the idea for the project online about four years ago, while looking for ways to encourage her older students’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills.

Though Naugher has used the project in the classroom once before, she decided to bring the project to life on a larger scale this year, knowing her fifth and sixth graders’ ability to “really excel.” Still, she was blown away by the results.

“You would be amazed at the structures that they were able to do,” Naugher told The Dispatch on Thursday. “We had everything from heels to boots to wedges to braids… I mean, it was quite impressive.”

Naugher said the project included 30 fifth-grade and 38 sixth-grade students in the school. Each class was divided up into pairs, and given a few guidelines for their designs.

The shoes needed to be made entirely of Scotch tape and donated copies of The Dispatch. They had to slip on and off and make it down the runway without tearing or ripping. They also needed to have a great design, and a name, slogan and marketing pitch to go with them, Naugher said, since one member of the pair would walk the runway in front of the judges while the other presented their final product.

Watching the students talk through problems, Naugher said, fell in line with her STEM class’s goal of focusing on real-world issues and problem solving.

“I loved that process, because they would figure out what worked, what didn’t work, what they had to fix or change,” Naugher said. “And they realized ‘well, this heel is not working.’ … And they would make the accommodations and make it work.”

Getting runway ready

Some students worked from sketches, or used their own feet to construct around, Naugher said. But one sixth-grade student, Gus McAdams, 12, decided to take a slightly different route – bringing one of his own cowboy boots from home to build around. His end product included spurs and bootstraps – details that helped him take home the uniqueness category for his class.

“I was pretty sure that everyone was going to do slides, since it’s much easier, and I knew it wouldn’t be super hard to do a boot, and you can make it (more) unique than the slides,” McAdams said.

Still, other students flexed their creativity differently. Caroline Smith, 12, decided to make a typical slide structure, but with a lot of features that made her design stand out from the pack, including interchangeable logos on the front and a credit card holder on the strap.

“I kind of just thought of people my age and also older people,” Smith said. “The credit card thing would be for grownups, and the interchangeable stickers would be for people my age, because people like to change their designs and make it their own.”

Smith’s design won the design category for her class.

Fellow sixth-grader and 12-year-old Gracie Edwards said despite challenges with working with newspaper and tape as her materials – since she dealt with the sides of her shoes falling down during the design process – she still found unique details printed on the material to highlight, and she was proud of the tennis shoes she and her partner designed. Edwards’ shoe took home the structure and build category for her class.

“My partner really loves (Mississippi) State,” Edwards said. “So he wanted to put a lot of State stuff on the shoe … But we made it really strong by just cutting out several pieces of newspaper and putting it on the sides and the bottom.”

Modeling her shoe was nerve-wracking, Edwards said, but she overcame those feelings quickly.

“It was kind of scary at first,” Edwards said. “But then I saw everyone else doing it, and it was like, it’s not that big of a deal.”

Sixth-grader Lizzie Galloway, 11, took home the overall category for her class. She and her partner made a sandal with a heel on it. Though they struggled initially with the material, Galloway said she had fun reading the marketing pitch for her shoe, and highlighting every detail of the design they had worked on for weeks.

“This was probably my favorite STEM project we’ve done,” Galloway said. “I just thought it was really creative, and we’ve never done anything like it before.”