Haitian Relief What Happened

WE DID IT!!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by charbeck10

Sargent Park School raised $2100 for Haitian Earthquake Relief.  When you couple this with the Canadian Governments matching all donations we raised $4200.  This is very respectable for a school of only 1000 students.  How did this all happen? Let's go back in time....

Earlier in the week I had been showing "The Big Picture" photo essays from Haiti.  This started the classes thinking.  At a blog post I requested the students to leave comments behind on what could be done at Sargent Park School.

These are the comments they came up with!! Now they had to make it happen!! We had a meeting and the Grade 8 students asked the Student Council if they could use a Fine Friday to help Haiti.  The student council agreed and the ball was set in motion.



Three teams of students created presentations to show to the school.  Each presentation based on the age level of the students watching.  We chose K to 3 for one assembly, 4 to 6 for another assembly and finally we had the Grade 7 and 9 students.  The Grade 8 students did not come to the assemblies because they had already had many information sessions about what was happening in Haiti already.

It was great to see the STUDENTS taking charge of the situation.  They were empowered to be the ones in charge.  Granted I set the ball in motion and planted the seeds BUT they took the initiative to get the whole school involved.

Fine Friday is a great fundraiser.  The school suspends "rules" that can be circumvented by paying a fine.  We chose 3 rules; no hats, no iPods in class and no stuffed animals in the classroom.  All of these school based rules would be waved on the Friday if the students payed a fine of a dollar.  This meant that the students bring in $1 to $3 donate to Haitian Relief.

As you can see from the first picture we did it.  Every student on average brought in $2.  Over 95% of the student participated.  There are no costs involved so everything was pure profit as a fundraiser. Both teachers and the students were impressed with the amount of money raised.

All of this activity falls back into the 2 Minutes to Make a Difference Movie Project that will be finished by late April.  I hope that the students now realize that One student or person CAN make a difference.