Area kids step up to help: Generosity of students aids the Gulf Coast
Published: September 19, 2005
Going door to door and asking for money is not an easy thing to do.
It’s even harder when those doors belong to businesses with policies and managerial hierarchies and other reasons to turn away a teenager showing up unannounced to sell stickers for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
“I wish my mom were here. I’d feel more confident,” 17-year-old Courtaney Craig said after unsuccessfully trying to get several Pittsford Plaza stores to sell $2 stickers that read “I helped make NEW ORLEANS NEW again!!!” She dropped off some at The Red Barn clothing boutique, but her mother, who knows the owner, had called ahead to get permission.
“I guess you live and you learn,” Craig said on the way back to her car, deciding to make phone calls of her own to the plaza’s other stores. Besides, the Brighton High School senior was certain that she and her classmates could sell the stickers, along with $2 awareness bracelets, at school functions.
From preschool to high school, area students are doing what they can to raise money, collect school supplies and offer comfort to storm victims — in many cases under the supervision of teachers who organized similar efforts after last year’s tsunami.
They’re selling lemonade, collecting coins, washing cars, recording CDs and donating proceeds from concerts, garage sales and school dances.
“All of these people have lost their homes and their belongings,” said Brandon Kallen, 12, of Brockport. “I wanted to do what I could to help.”
Brandon was one of about 50 volunteers who raised about $2,800 for the relief effort during a garage sale Sunday in Clarkson. The sale was held by Cool Kids, a Brockport group that teaches cultural awareness. Other local businesses and groups joined the effort, said Cool Kids director Steve Appleton.
Community members unloaded hundreds of gently used items at the Clarkson Fire Hall — clothes, books, furniture — while shoppers combed through them.
Hannah Sulkowski, 11, of Brockport donated clothes and toys. While at the sale, she also wrote letters of encouragement to Gulf Coast residents, to show the survivors that she’s thinking of them.
Kids can identify
The youngest among those trying to make a difference may not fully understand the enormity of the situation, but they can imagine what life would be like without clothes, crayons, toothbrushes and other items they use every day. The Johnson brothers at the Genesee Community Charter School on East Avenue started a coin drive to help relatives in Opelousas, La., which is swelling rapidly with the sudden influx of displaced families looking for shelter. Seven-year-old Kimathi and 5-year-old Cabral have seen remarkable generosity from classmates, some of whom have given up their morning “choice time” — when they can play games and socialize — to roll the coins in paper wrappers.
“One of the kindergartners brought in this huge bin of pennies,” said their mother, Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. “She had been saving them because she planned on buying a car.”
At the Ninth Grade Academy in the Rush-Henrietta district, students will get to shave Principal Christopher Barker’s head if the school raises $2,500 by the end of the month.
“One of the advisers asked me about it,” Barker said. “She asked if it was OK, and I said, ‘You’d have to ask my wife.’ It’s all in fun. Whatever it takes. I’m a little bit thinning in the hair anyway.”
Junior and senior classes at Bishop Kearney High School filled 20 bookbags and more than 20 grocery bags with school supplies being given today to the Rochester Christian Response Team, which will distribute them to students as they arrive from down south.
Some school districts are hoping to establish long-term relationships with the students they end up helping.
Byron-Bergen students in Genesee County are searching for a similar district in Mississippi, where they hope to initiate regular correspondence after sending books, music, video games, stuffed animals and “other things that may not be covered under Red Cross and the Salvation Army and so on,” said Loren Penman, director of learning.
Hilton High School is sending money to Louisiana’s Thibodaux High School north of New Orleans. Thibodaux, where more than 100 students recently enrolled with no supplies or belongings, is trading monetary donations for gift cards from Wal-Mart, which is matching the amounts. At a picnic during the first week of school, Hilton students raised $1,100 in less than two hours.
In Webster last week, Holy Trinity School sponsored a “Pay up, dress down” day during which students could donate $1 or more for the privilege of leaving their uniforms at home. Third-grader Baltazar Ortiz got to wear his favorite clothes — a T-shirt with a skateboarder decal and a pair of blue pants he wears to the skatepark.
“The thing was, we also had opening-school Mass, so the kids were not dressed for church too well,” said principal Christopher Meagher. “But it was going to a good cause.”
Students in kindergarten through sixth grade raised $236.40.
Many area Catholic schools are collecting at least $1 from students in response to a fundraising campaign by the National Catholic Educational Association, which is buying school supplies for — and aiding the placement of — displaced students in Catholic schools and religious education programs nationwide.
Skipping ice cream
At least once a week, children at Laurelton-Pardee Intermediate School in East Irondequoit are forfeiting their after-lunch ice cream and dropping at least 60 cents into a container near the cafeteria freezer. One student gave $5 the first day of what has been made a yearlong commitment.
“It’s kind of easy, because I’d rather donate some money than eat ice cream,” said fifth-grader Zack Wilkinson, who has given about $3. “I would feel horrible with absolutely nothing.”
Even stranded pets are getting attention.
After Madeline McGrain Githler’s aunt, uncle and their Australian sheepdog escaped to her Pittsford home from New Orleans, the 10-year-old learned that the pets left behind in the disaster had plenty of donated food but not enough love. So she and her friends at Pittsford’s Harley Middle School collected bags of animal toys that her aunt and uncle are delivering to a humane society near New Orleans.
The students at Brighton High School, meanwhile, have a lofty goal: They want to raise $10,000.
“Who knows what the possibilities could be?” asked Craig, who took $150 from her checking account to buy the fundraising stickers.
“We have to start somewhere. I want to sort of use myself and my high school as an example that if we work together, we can make it happen.”
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: