Charity collects soda tabs

PLAINS - A competition between the different classes at the Plains School District began last week. Each class has been tasked with a mission to see how many can tabs they can collect by the last week of school before Winter Break. The class that collects the most tabs will be rewarded with a pizza party. The goal is to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House.

At http://www.rmhc.org/what-we-do, the Ronald McDonald House states, “Helping a sick child fight their illness takes a big enough emotional toll on a family. Adding a financial strain can make it all almost too much to bear. RMHC can help address those problems, whether they involve housing that’s near a hospitalized child, the expense of staying together in another city, or even getting basic medical and dental care in a vulnerable community.”

Amy Miller, the mother of Franklin Reed, who passed away from Leukemia while attending Plains High School, started the competition in the Plains School District.

“It was three days after Franklin was diagnosed with leukemia they had the homecoming football game and they had passed around a boot and they had collected over $1,500 to help with expenses and so it was just an amazing way for a community that I had never been to and my son had only been here a year and it was just amazing to see the community just come together for a young man who had only been here for a short time,” Miller said. 

She explained how she wanted to start something at the school to help the Ronald McDonald house and to also teach the students about caring and how important the foundation is.

“I don’t want them to just do it because of the pizza party, I want them to do it because I am hoping to show it’s more than just a place where children and families go to have cancer, it’s a place where if a child is in medical need and they can’t be home and that this is a home away from home for them and it is for any child,” Miller explained.

The Ronald McDonald house turns in the can tabs to pay for repairs to the facilities, pay for food, general upkeep and the many other expenses of running a facility that houses children and families battling cancer.

Miller described her experience setting up the competition with the school as simple and easy.

She said, “I actually just went in and spoke with the counselor and I just kind of asked him, I said, ‘I would like to do something that would be fun for the kids to do and I would like to do is have each one of the classes try to bring in the most amount of tabs in weight for a certain amount of time and at the end of that time, Franklin’s family would like to do a pizza party for the class.”

In addition to Miller setting up the competition at the school, she and her husband will soon start to sponsor the room where they stayed while Franklin battled leukemia.

Update:

The class in charge of the counting and collection of the soda tabs is the Jobs for Montana Graduates class. Dayton Price has been declared the coordinator of the project and Keelie Crabb is her committee worker.

Last week Price said that the school has already collected close to 10,000 tabs and that the kindergarten class is in the lead with the most collected.