Delaware Online

As the Beatles said, you’ll get by with a little help from your friends — or, you know, build the world’s tallest LEGO tower with a little help from an entire school district.

MORE: Simpsons Legos Are Coming in 2014

Brick by tiny plastic brick, the students of Red Clay School District toiled for months to assemble sections of a tower comprising over half a million LEGOs. After several days of what Delaware Online describes as “painstaking engineering,” the LEGO brick tower was complete, an improbable “toy” edifice soaring over John Dickinson High School near Wilmington, Delaware flaunting colorful layers of pumpkin orange, electric green and light royal blue.

“Wow. Just — wow,” said Ralph Storner, one of the students who helped build the tower (via Delaware Online). “You know when you’re talking about a world record it’s going to be big. But seeing it now, it’s really cool.”

All told, the tower weighs nearly a ton and stands nearly 113 feet tall, making it the tallest structure composed of toy bricks ever assembled, according to the Guinness Book of World Records (the prior record-holder was a 106-foot tower built in Prague in 2012). The bricks were pieced together in sections by students over the past several months, then those sections were stacked by contractors who’d volunteered to help out, constructing the tower around a metal cylinder and using tension cables to keep it from tipping over.

While the number of feet in a story varies, it’s generally around 10 (think room height plus space for floor and ceiling), allowing the school district to reasonably claim the tower is around 11 stories tall.

Why — aside from fleeting Guinness record notoriety — enlist a bunch of students to build an 11-story-tall LEGO tower at all?

“We want kids to get a message out of this,” said district superintendent Mervin Daugherty. “One kid could never put this together. But when we all work together, when we’re all a team, we can do something that people probably thought would be impossible.”

MORE: Pittsburgh Bridge Gets a ‘Yarn-Bomb’ Makeover