Connecticut School Has Record Number of Twins

                                                                  (Image Credit: Staples High School)

The class of 2014 at Staples High School in Westport, Conn., is one for the record books, thanks to 16 sets of twins.

Luke Foreman, 16, who has a twin sister, Meghan, had the idea one day to count the number of twins in his class.

"Right from the beginning I knew we had a lot of twins in our grade, but it didn't strike me as unusual until I counted all the twins we had. We came up with the 14th pair of twins, and I thought we had something cool," Luke told the Stamford Advocate.

After he realized his class had beaten the Guinness Book of World Record's current record holder, a class in Massachusetts, Luke approached his principal about certifying the record.

Principal John Dodig asked his secretary to go through the school roster to count the number of twins, Dodig told ABC News.  Two additional pairs were discovered, bringing the total number of sets of twins in the current sophomore class to 16; the current record holder has 13 sets of twins.

Once Dodig knew his school had a record on its hands, he helped Luke begin the certification process to get the class of 2014 into the Guinness Book.

"We had to produce a list of all of the names of the twins and their birth dates and send it on my letterhead with the school seal," he said. "Then he had to collect the birth certificates."

The final steps in the arduous verification process came Thursday when the twins gathered for a picture in the school's auditorium and an independent witness verified their presence.

If everything goes according to plan, Dodig said the new record should be official by the time the class of 2014 becomes juniors.

"[The twins]  say, 'We had nothing to do with it. It's just by birth,' but they think it's pretty cool," Dodig said.

Twins account for 8.42 percent of the 380-student Staples High School class of 2014.

Just 2 percent of the U.S. population has a twin, according to the Twin Association.