Students give pennies for patients

WASILLA -- Students at Iditarod Elementary had a difficult choice to make over the last few weeks: is giving up a cookie at lunchtime worth saving a life?

Iditarod Elementary, along with other schools across the Valley, has been running the Pennies for Patients program for over two weeks.

This project involves soliciting small donations from elementary school students to aid victims of leukemia and other blood-borne cancers. Iditarod students have been working to aid Ariel Courtwright, a 9-year-old Eagle River resident who has acute lymphocytic leukemia.

In addition to fund-raising, the Pennies for Patients project endeavored to instruct students of all ages in the nature and transmission of blood-borne cancers.

Each participating group watched an age-specific video on blood cancers, including information about prevention, treatment processes, and the cost of handling infected patients.

Tracy Verrall and Toni Moore, teachers at Iditarod Elementary, spearheaded the school's collection drives.

Adopting the phrase: "Give a quarter, save a life," as their motto, the pair inspired their students to scrape together all the change they could to aid Ariel. Verrall and Moore worked with the Iditarod Student Council to formulate creative ideas and motivational techniques.

Wednesday is "Give Up Your Cookie Day" at Iditarod. On Wednesdays, students forego purchasing a 25-cent cookie in order to put an additional quarter in the Pennies for Patients collection jar.

Other themed collection days at Iditarod included Penny Day, Nickel and Dime day, and Raid Your Piggybank Day. Students were reminded of these themes by morning and afternoon announcements, as well as colorful posters and flyers all over the school. All of these measures were designed to get children to dig deep and contribute as much change as possible to the project. The students responded with an amazing outpouring of support for the collections.

"There's a student here who gives me a nickel every day," said Rose Teich, Administrative Secretary at Iditarod. "He keeps saying: 'I get my allowance tomorrow, so I'll bring in more then.'"

A sacrifice of unusual magnitude was undertaken by Saesha Steinbacher, Tyler Lestenkof, and Rachel Brown, three girls in Verrall's class who abandoned their communal treehouse fund to the Pennies project. The girls had collected roughly $17 in change to put toward materials for constructing a treehouse, but decided to contribute the money to Ariel once they learned of her plight. "When I heard about what they were going, it reminded me of my grandpa and how he had cancer long ago," said Brown.

Though the postponement of the treehouse plans naturally caused some hard feelings among the three collaborators, positive thoughts won through in the end.

"I felt really good about it, because if one of us had cancer, then our friends would give money to help us out," said Steinbacher.

During the first two days alone, Iditarod Elementary collected $200, and last week the total was well over $500. The success of the program is largely a factor of the effort devoted to administering donations by the staff of the school.

Despite the administrative and organizational energy put into the project, however, the true heroes are the students who contributed change from out of their own pockets.

"Student participation and donations in this program is a good motivation," said Teich. "It's a program to help people and to find a cure."

Contact Daniel Spoth at daniel.spoth@frontiersman.com.