Farmington Students Reach Out to Japan

Three Farmington Public Schools Listserv emails arrived in my inbox Wednesday, all with two words in common: "for Japan."

Students at and Upper Elementary Schools and all planned fundraisers this week for victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Two days later, I received an email from with the same purpose.

It is not at all unusual to learn about schools taking on charitable causes, and I suppose that's what struck me most. Deep down, I expected I'd be doing these stories, because that's the just the way Farmington and Farmington Hills kids are.

At Power, Janet Payne's fifth-grade students learned about the tragedy during their social studies class.

"On Wednesday, we learned quite a bit about the devastation in Japan," student Jacob Honer said. "We wanted to make a difference."

"It made us feel really scared," added Nikhil Yadati, "because there's so many things that happened, and because it's by water, so other things could happen."

Taylor Terry felt the way many adults did the day the news broke. "I felt really worried for them, and are they going to be OK. I didn't know what to do."

Payne said the idea for a fundraiser came from the students. With a vote of the class, they decided to create "Hat Day" on Friday. Students donated $1 – or whatever they had – and that would allow them to wear a hat to school.

"They said, 'What can we do?' And within an hour, they had this all put together," Payne said.

At Longacre, students were dressed in their jammies on Friday. They had already planned a "Get Cozy and Read" day as part of the school's National Reading Month celebration.

But the students are also learning this year about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Students, a branch of author Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People series of books and seminars. One of those habits is to always look for the "win/win" – such as being able to wear pajamas to school and helping people in desperate need at the same time.

"It's really cute to see the kids bring in their little bags of pennies," Student Council coordinator Pam Choate said. "These kids are just wonderful."

I'll be going to Warner Upper Elementary next week to learn more about the student project there, which involves handmade origami cranes. And we'll follow up in two weeks when East Middle School's Penny Wars fundraiser ends, to let you know whether the seventh- or the eighth-graders contributed the most pennies to help the people of Japan.

Every little bit helps – the pennies, the nickels, the dimes, quarters and dollars, all of it will be used by relief agencies such as the American Red Cross to make sure people have clean water, food, a place to sleep.

The students I talked with all seemed to realize they were doing something special.

"It's good. I like to help Japan, because it's cool," Power student Caroline Callander said.

"It makes me feel good," her classmate Kelly Khaykin said, "but I think we could do more to help."

Fifth-graders, reaching out to people halfway around the world and understanding their arms aren't nearly long enough.

How cool is that?