Violet Putney, Ophelia Foley and Olivia Duffy, 7th graders at Paxton Center School, hadn’t heard of The Crayon Initiative until Foley’s mom read about it and shared the organization’s goal.
The Crayon Initiative, which was established as a nonprofit in 2014, aims to reduce crayon waste by repurposing unused crayons by melting them down, and reshaping them to be large and three-sided for children in hospitals. The three-sided design allows for easy gripping and prevents the crayons from rolling away.
“We wanted to collect old crayons because we figured that would be something people here would have a lot of,” Putney said.
The girls approached science teacher Scott Wahlstrom about their idea and set the wheels in motion.
“We have a community service requirement here in the school for 8th graders and these young ladies approached me, said they wanted to do this, and I immediately jumped on board as an advisor,” Wahlstrom said.
According to Wahlstrom, Paxton Center School aims to provide chances for students to have leadership opportunities and implement projects they themselves can head up.
“My role is mostly to say “how do you think you wanna solve that, how would you go about doing it?” Wahlstrom explained. “This is part of that goal as well, learning to talk to adults in different contexts and honing leadership skills.”
Foley, Putney and Duffy got to work printing out posters, collecting boxes, creating a sign up, getting approval from the principal, and then presenting their project to participating classrooms.
Throughout the collection period, they included a box decorating competition between classes and then gave them two to three weeks to collect as many crayons as they could.
“After the collections ended, we weighed each box separately and added them all together to get the total,” Foley said. “We ended up collecting 92.5 lbs of crayons to donate.”
At the conclusion, the class with the most collections received a certificate and a trophy. Foley’s mom took over the task of taking their collections to a local Staples, who will ship to The Crayon Initiative for free.
“It went really well,” Putney said. “I’m relieved it’s over because we had to use a lot of our homeroom block time for planning, and then scheduling. Olivia made a form for the teachers to sign up on and it took a while for all of them to sign up, and then the time it took us to do all the presentations… But I feel like it went really well.”
Wahlstrom stated that for him, it’s easy to be involved because it gives him the chance to watch his students go and do great things because they had the dream to do it and make it happen.
“Olivia, Violet and Ophelia were really the brains and the idea behind the operation,” Wahlstrom concluded.
For more information on The Crayon Initiative and how you can get involved, visit www.thecrayoninitiative.org.