Images of the devastation wrought by the earthquake and ensuing tsunami in Japan on March 11 motivated a group of students at Sawyer Woods Elementary to raise money for relief efforts.
Members of the Student Academic Leadership Team, SALT for short, felt like they had to do something to do something.
“We thought it was important because we saw all the people in need and we thought we should help,” said fourth grader Luke Vongoedert, a member of SALT. “I helped by bringing in money and trying get other people to.”
Fifth grader Taylor Welch, another member of SALT, explained that the group came up with the idea to do some kind of fundraiser.
Amy Frank, SALT’s advisor, approved the idea and took it to the principal, Tim Helgeson.
“He liked the idea,” Welch said. “So, we started coming up with ideas of how we were going to do it.”
Discussion in the classroom as well as at home, Welch said, spurred the ideas. She stated that students saw pictures of the aftermath on the Internet “of how bad it was and we thought we should have a fundraiser for it.”
Welch added that SALT spent about two weeks planning the weeklong fundraiser.
Frank had seen the idea of a coin fundraiser carried out while she taught in Medical Lake and suggested it to SALT.
Each morning during the week of the fundraiser jars for each grade level were set up outside, Frank wrote in a release, and when a student brought coins it was placed in the jar for his grade. If a child brought paper money, however, it was placed in a different grade’s jar and counted against their own grade level’s total.
Each grade was competing against the rest of the school with the grade that raised the most money promised donuts as the prize.
“There would be PTA members and two other SALT members taking care of all the money,” Welch said. “And the PTA members afterward would be counting all the money. We thought it would go well especially on Friday since everyone wanted to win the competition.”
Frank noted that some of the students began employing strategies quickly. One day students in one grade level tried to hoard its coins so another grade level put a number of dollar bills in its jar.
A grandmother sent her granddaughter to school with $100 in quarters in an effort to help the girl’s grade.
Welch said SALT had set a goal of $500 for the fundraiser.
Vongoedert said the fundraiser exceeded even his expectations.
“I think we did really good, we raised over $3,000, I was expecting about $1,000,” he said.
In total, Sawyer Woods students raised $3,862.64, which was considerably beyond the modest goal set prior to the start of the fundraiser.
“On Friday we were blown away because we didn’t think that many people would bring in that many coins,” Welch said. “And it multiplied by two the amount of money that had been brought in the rest of the week.”
Welch added that this fundraiser demonstrated that Sawyer Woods students can see beyond the walls of their school and “how they’re supposed to cooperate and care about all the things that happened in Japan.”
