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The Class of 2013 is attempting to achieve two Guinness World Records: most number of twins to graduate in a year and most number of twins in a high school class. There are 17 sets of twins, which is just enough to surpass both current world records.

Wesley Drew, organizer of this event, said, “I don’t know who held the previous record, but I do know that it was 16 twins, according to what Guinness World Records provided us with, so 17 would put us just one over that.”

In order to attempt the world records, Drew had to gather the students’ class records, birth certificates, copies of their driver’s licenses and copies of their school IDs. “The first thing that I did is they sent me a pretty thick packet, probably 30 or 40 sheets of information, on what we had to do. After that, I read through the information, and I started to get in touch with the kids because I wanted to get them organized first,” Drew said. “From that point, I started talking to community leaders to try to get witnesses from outside the school to come witness the event and so we got Mr. Brainard, we have the Carmel police department and we have another local attorney.”

Samuel “Sam” and Andrew “A.J.” DiCarlo were the twins who came up with the idea of trying to break the world records. “Zionsville was trying to beat it last year, and that’s how (Sam) got the idea,” A.J. said.

After he got the idea, they started to prepare for the attempt. “(Sam) pretty much proposed it to Mr. Williams, and Mr. Williams put Mr. Drew in charge, and Mr. Drew got all the information ready, sent it to Guinness World Records and got all the twins,” A.J. said. “We had two meetings, and then Sam emailed Guinness to see what we had to do and got the claim IDs.”

Although CHS will most likely break both world records, the process of submitting the evidence and receiving word back is lengthy. “We’re going to go ahead and organize all the materials here in the next couple days,” Drew said. “We’ll send it off, and my understanding is it takes anywhere from eight to 12 weeks to hear back after that. I’m hopeful we’ll hear something by the end of the school year.”

Both Sam and Andrew said they believe that this is a unique high school experience. “It’s something special that we can do for the Class of 2013 and get Carmel High School recognized,” Sam said.