NEW PALESTINE — They called their efforts “Rockin Red for Riley.” Three New Palestine High School (NPHS) students who sold red T-shirts raised over $3,100 for Riley Hospital for Children.
The team of NPHS seniors — Katie Hirschy, Kylee Beranek and Ashlyn Sanford — are part of a Service Learning class taught by NPHS teacher Jeremy Large. In the class, students are asked to come up with ideas of doing something for the community and then bringing those ideas to fruition.
“This class, what I love about these service learning projects is the students have to challenge themselves and do a lot of communications and a lot of talking to adults, which is something many kids don’t do enough of nowadays,” Large said.
The students were also assigned with learning about the logistics and figuring everything out from start to finish such as how they would develop them market their product.
“There were a lot of different obstacles the students have to adjust to an adapt,” Large said.
The three students say they’ve really enjoyed the class and coming up with a project that benefited someone else.
“We just really loved the idea of helping young people, the younger generations because they’re the ones who are going to be here after us,” Katie said. “Just getting involved with kids is something we wanted to do.”
The girls noted NPHS principal Jim Voelz has always supported Riley Hospital for Children, so raising money for the kids seemed like a good cause because they were familiar with the hospital’s efforts.
The students designed the red T-shirts, sold them at school and around town and ended up raising approximately $3,195 for Riley Hospital for Children.
“It’s been really great because I don’t think we had any expectations about how well we’d do,” Katie said.
Kylee noted the girls would get to school early, set up and sell the shirts to help get other students to know what they were doing.
“It’s been so rewarding,” she said.
Susan Miles is from Riley Hospital and noted said it’s always a good day when young people stop, take the time to think of others and then are able to make a donation.
“It’s so wonder,” Miles said. “The money raised goes straight to helping kids and this school corporation has been very supportive of Riley Hospital for years and the corporation usually always achieves ‘Red Wagon,’ status which represents a dollar raised per student.”
Miles went on to say it’s great to see kids giving their time to help others at a young age because it’s something they’ll probably continue to do as adults. Raising money for Riley is just one of the two project the girls are doing this year.
“The other project that we’re doing is in the elementary schools where we’ll be there to help them with their social skills and things like that,” Ashlyn said. “So, both of our projects are about helping kids because we knew that was something we wanted to do when we were brainstorming ideas.”
