Hopkins students donate hair for a good cause
Published: February 10, 2005
About two years ago, shortly after her son was born, Kari Wehrmann decided she was going to grow her hair out.
Wehrmann, an eighth-grade English teacher at Hopkins West Junior High, said she was sleep-deprived from spending nights up with him and thought it would be easiest just to keep her hair up in a pony tail rather than try to fiddle with it.
She told herself she would cut her hair when she was finished with her dissertation, in some sort of symbolic fashion.
At the time she didn’t know it, but her laziness would lead to a good cause.
This week Wehrmann will get her hair cut and donate it to Locks of Love, a nonprofit organization that provides hair pieces to financially disadvantaged children who suffer from long-term medical hair loss.
And she is not alone – she has recruited seven other Hopkins staff members as well as 11 Hopkins students to do the same.
The 19 of them will be going to the Rocco Altobelli Salon and Day Spa in Minnetonka on Valentine’s Day. Each donor is required to give at least 10 inches of hair, so the group will be donating more than 190 inches of hair.
“I thought as long as I’m growing it out, I might as well give it to a good cause,” Wehrmann said.
She said she was talking about donating her hair at the junior high’s parent/teacher conferences last spring when the idea of trying to recruit more people to donate their hair popped up. The idea spread by word of mouth and “all of a sudden it was 20 people,” she said.
The group, which is all females, decided to pick a day to all get their hair cut, and since the organization is called Locks of Love, they thought Valentine’s Day would fit perfectly.
Wehrmann said she probably wouldn’t donate her hair again next year, but she hopes other people still might.
“I would like it to be an annual event,” she said. “I’m hoping that someone else will take the torch and run with it.”
For her, cutting her hair is going to be a big relief, she said, but she knows it will be difficult for some of the girls. A couple of them already backed out of doing it.
She said in junior high a lot of the girls want to be able to have “Lindsay Lohan” or “Britney Spears” hair, so cutting their hair really short can be quite drastic.
The girls were relieved to know there would be Locks of Love T-shirts to go along with their new ’dos, Wehrmann said, because then people at school would know why their hair was so short.
But they know their hair is going to a good cause, she said.
“They’re excited to be a part of something bigger than themselves,” she said.
It takes between five and 10 pony tails to make one wig, so Wehrmann isn’t sure the girls will be able to meet the specific recipients of their hair, but said she would like them to meet someone who has a similar medical condition to the children who participate in Locks of Love.
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