In 2018, District 109 students raised more than $150,000 for charitable causes

By Steve Sadin | Lake County News-Sun

In 2018, students in Deerfield Public Schools District 109 stepped up and donated both time and funds through philanthropy clubs.

Collectively the district’s students, teachers and staff donated more than $150,000 and countless hours to over 25 different projects in 2018 along with books, food, sundries, toys, clothes and school supplies to local, national and international organizations.

Earlier in the year Kipling, Wilmot and Walden Elementary Schools raised $92,159 for the American Heart Association’s Jump Rope for Heart program, according to Superintendent Anthony McConnell.

Students at South Park Elementary School raised $5,000 to purchase school supplies to fill 400 backpacks for Cradles for Crayons and then spent an all school assembly filling them for under resourced children in the Chicago area.

Among causes embraced by the Philanthropy Club at Shepard Middle School, faculty advisor Laura Ashman said eight to 10 students joined officials from West Deerfield Township and from the Deerfield Police Department staffing the annual Halloween party the township gives for special needs children.

The year ended when Caruso Middle School students announced collection of $11,062 Dec. 21 to benefit Aaron’s Coffee Corner at Chicago’s Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

The Caruso effort honored one of the students’ schoolmates, Aaron Kobb, who has been in and out of the intensive care unit with a metabolic genetic disorder, according to his mother Carolyn Koppel.

Koppel said she was assisting nurses caring for Aaron one night at the hospital. She had little sleep, wanted a cup of coffee but was afraid leave him and take the time to go to the ground floor to get it. She got the idea of a coffee station on each floor.

“I wrote to the CEO of Keurig and (the company) was on board,” Koppel said. “The people at Lurie said let’s start with one floor and see how it goes.”

Kobb’s schoolmates at Caruso embraced the cause for their annual charity drive, according to organizers Lexi Cadkin, Lindsay Katai and Jake Perlman. Students sold cookies, pizza and lunchtime items. Katai said more than 1,000 lollipops were sold. There were games as well.

“Everyone wanted to give to this charity,” Cadkin said.

Ashman said Shepard students have helped at the Halloween party for several years. She said it offers a quieter holiday activity for children who want that. The students work at booths assisting with things like pumpkin carving and games.

“It is one event everyone really remembers,” Ashman said referring to Shepard students and participants. “The kids are beaming from ear to ear.”

Along with helping out at the party, Ashman said Shepard students collected 1,200 pairs of shoes for people in Liberia and 375 pairs of socks during “Socktober” for area children in need.

Along with South Park’s teachers donating 6,000 books to Bernie’s Book Bank in Lake Bluff, Diane Near, a teacher who runs the gifted program there, said the entire student body embraced the idea of helping their peers who have less. They raised $5,000 to buy school supplies to fill backpacks contributed by an anonymous donor. They did the work too.

Near said students raised the money by connecting with people and asking them to pledge donations for the walkathon they did last spring nearly two miles from the school to the West Deerfield Township Food Pantry.

“It was all school walk,” Near said. “Each student carried a food item to donate.”

In its second year at Kipling, Wilmot and Walden, Jump Rope for Heart is a program where students raise money in a variety of ways on their own, according to Bradley Greenberg, a physical education teacher at Kipling who runs the program there. He said they reach out to friends and family, in some cases with the help of parents’ social media networks.

Greenberg said the students learned from the American Heart Association every $50 raised saves a life. The children become highly motivated when they realize how they are helping others.

“I turn into the biggest cheerleader in the world for them,” Greenberg said. “They do all the work.”

Sometimes students use group efforts like those at Wilmot who operated a hot chocolate stand in their neighborhood, according to Sam Tallidis, a physical education teacher there. He said in the past they have had car washes, lemonade stands and gone door to door.

Kipling had the third best effort in the state and 28th nationally, according to Greenberg. Wilmot was fifth in Illinois.

McConnell said this year Jump Rope for Heart will be a district-wide program. He said the effort for all the fundraising goes beyond the students to the community with the schools’ PTO organizations playing a “huge” role.