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Build-a-chair project by Paintbrush students will benefit hospice house
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| Paintbrush Elementary student council members from left, Tim Guernsey, 10, Kayte Williams, 11, and Mitch Shinkle, 10, work on assembling a chair for the new Hospice/Hospitality House on Wednesday morning before class. “We have been working on the fundraising for this project for a year and a half,” said Paintbrush teacher Pam Jackson. Teachers pitched in their Scholastic Books program points to buy furniture, games, bracelets and even a computer to help furnish the hospice house children’s room. - News-Record photo by Alton Strupp |
By JEREMY GOLDMEIER, News-Record Writer jgoldmeier@gillettenewsrecord.net
Anyone who has ever set aside a Saturday to put together furniture knows that it’s no cakewalk.Slots. Bolts. Wrenches. Unless you already do that sort of thing for a living, you know you’re in for at least a couple of hours of head-scratching frustration.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that members of Paintbrush Elementary’s student council voluntarily gathered an hour before school Wednesday to assemble wooden chairs and toy drawers. The third- through sixth-graders were working to complete the furniture for donation to Gillette’s upcoming Hospice/Hospitality House, which is slated to open in January.
The hand-assembled items will find a place in the house’s children’s room, which will provide young ones a place to play while their families stay at the facility. Fitting the wooden puzzle pieces together made for a tough challenge, as the students worked together to follow their assembly instruction manuals.
Running the show was Pam Jackson, the Paintbrush library assistant who has become a fundraising dynamo in recent years. Over the past two years, Jackson says Paintbrush staff and students have raised more than $3,000 to go toward the hospice house.
Those efforts have included pizza nights, a mobile store that sells school supplies and jerky for $1 a pop, and “Hats for Hospice” days, where Paintbrush students pay $1 to wear a hat to school.
With that money, the school has either bought or plans to buy a couch, a Wii video game system, books, a computer and other bits of entertainment for the hospice children’s room.
Technically, the furniture students built Wednesday wasn’t paid for with that money — it came from the school cashing in bonus points from participation in the Scholastic Books program, Jackson says.
As Wednesday’s morning bell approached, the young carpenters looked to be making good progress. That is, until one of them tried to sit in one of the chairs. The boy and the chair went tumbling over.
“Mrs. Jackson!” called one of the students.
“Don’t sit on it, you guys,” Jackson said, hurrying over. “You’re too big.”
But it turned out that the spill wasn’t about the boy’s size at all. The kids had accidentally attached the chair to its wooden frame upside-down. It seemed that student council members would have to meet a second time to finish all their work.
Jackson says it’s worth the trouble, though. In November, she wants to take the students on a field trip to the hospice house to see what they’ve been working toward.
The whole project has confirmed to her that Gillette is a charitable town.
“People are really good about donating and giving in Gillette,” Jackson says. “You just have to ask them.”
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