Creativity paid off for students at John F. Kennedy Middle, after the school was awarded $2,000-worth of Box Tops for decorating a display at the Portsmouth commissary.

Two representatives from General Mills, which runs the Box Tops for Education program, visited the school yesterday with a faux check for 20,000 Box Top points.

One of them, Ron Hesson, explained that the commissary’s director selected JFK to decorate the back-to-school display.

The school was emailed pictures of the display, he said, from which students came up with their design.

The process was repeated at commissaries across the nation, Hesson said, and the Suffolk middle school was one of only 12 schools judged to be winners.

“Fifty-seven schools didn’t win,” he said.

Simon Eng, the company’s other representative, said “someone from General Mills headquarters” judged the competition right before students returned to classes in September.

Vivian Covington, JFK’s principal, was on hand for the presentation ceremony Thursday. “It will help the school, because we can use the money to buy instructional materials,” she said.

It was “wonderful” to have students contribute to the community by decorating the commissary display, Covington added.

The little pink coupons can be found on more than 250 General Mills products, and each one is worth 10 cents.

Schools can use Box Tops to buy whatever they require, and, across America, they’ve earned more than $525 million since the school fundraising loyalty program was introduced in 1996.

Emma Neave, a seventh-grade English teacher at JFK, said classes at the school compete with each other to collect the most Box Tops.

“I’m very competitive, and my students appreciate that they collected 264 in a month,” she said.

“It really had put a bounce in their step that they are the winning Box Top class.”