Flyers around the school have announced the return of the Miss CHS Pageant at Chamblee High School, accompanied by a display of past winners on the second floor outside of Mr. Deondrick Mack’s room. In the past, this competition has been an event hosted by Beta Club, as was the case in 2009 when proceeds were donated towards finding a cure for muscular dystrophy.

“The Miss CHS pageant is not necessarily a beauty pageant, but a pageant that shows the overall person. We get this good peek into the contestants’ personalities and who they are as a person, what they do for the school, and everything, so it really helps to see who has that spirit for Chamblee. Besides just highlighting the ladies that are in it, [the pageant is] also to highlight things that need more like fundraisers, because typically, money that’s been raised [for Miss CHS] has been given to a charity organization. We’re going to be continuing the same thing and let the Queens actually decide which charity we donate to,” said Mack.

Prior to 2009, Miss CHS contestants were nominated by every class through a collection of ballots. However, due to many girls dropping out of the competition, the Beta Club organizers decided to require interested individuals to audition for the 2009 pageant and enact a policy of freshmen not being allowed to compete.

This year, however, the competition will be organized a little differently under the direction of Mack and the pageant’s sponsoring club, My Brother’s Keeper.

“We actually will have four queens [and] basically [have] a representative for each class, so we’ll have a freshman queen, sophomore queen, junior queen, and then the senior queen will be Miss CHS,” said Mack.

One change Mack is hoping to make to the pageant is having alumni of the competition return to help with the judging process.

“As of now, I don’t have a good idea about what it was like in the past, but one thing that we’re trying to do is have some of the past Queens come back to be judges. I really want to try to get into their mind to see what the pageant was like back in the day [and] to see if there’s any characteristics from the past that we want to make sure stays involved that becomes tradition with us,” said Mack.

The decision to compete is one that is accompanied by the understanding that one must commit great time and effort into preparing for this pageant.

“The one who raises the most money will get to decide [what charity to donate the funds to] because all the ladies will pick their own personal charity that they want to donate to, and if they fundraise the most money, their charity is going to win the donations. [Fundraising] will be independent. They’ll go around asking people to support them and ask for money, and then hopefully, they get enough for their charity to win,” said Mack.

Events of past Miss CHS competitions have included poetry recitation, dancing, and interviews, with judges typically looking for talent, pose, presentation, and appearance. This year’s categories are slightly different, but still maintain the interview portion of the pageant while placing more emphasis on competitors’ abilities rather than physical appearance.

“We have three main categories. The first category will be school spirit, or Blue and Gold category, so they wear something that’s representative of the school colors or of Chamblee as a whole. The second category is the talent category [where] they get to choose the outfit that goes best with whatever talent that they have. Anything can end up being your talent […] some of your hobbies could [even] be your talent. The last category is the formal and interview questions. They’ll have some type of formal gown or outfit on, and then they’ll have the interview question to answer. We’re going to give the ladies the questions beforehand so that they can have a chance to practice those,” said Mack.

The Miss CHS Pageant was discontinued after the 2010-11 competition, but Mack was motivated to reinstate it at Chamblee in order to provide more opportunities for students.

“Besides just wanting to give the students as many opportunities as possible, all the students who come here, you never know who’s going to end up doing what. We probably do have some beauty queens [and] potential beauty queens here, and they’re missing out because we don’t have our pageant anymore. So I was like, let me go ahead and try and bring the pageant back since I want to have everybody be like hey, when I was in high school I was able to work on my craft because we had the pageant,” said Mack.

Additionally, the sponsoring club of this pageant, My Brothers Keeper, will receive some of the funds to support their excursions.

“This year we are being sponsored by My Brother’s Keeper to fundraise money so that we can take our members on trips [and] college tours,” said Mack. “Basically get out of the state, out of the Atlanta metro, and see what else is out there surrounding us.”

For those interested in attending and supporting this cause, the Miss CHS Pageant is to be held on April 12th in the Chamblee auditorium from 7 to 9 pm. The event is open to the public and ticket sales are to be announced!