Classmates at Prairie Park School banded together to buy a gift for a third-grader with cancer.
Timmy Adams is ill with cancer in a hospital far from Lawrence. But his classmates at Prairie Park School think about him every day as they count the pennies they are amassing so they can buy him a gift.
"We were going for 2,000 pennies, then 4,000, and now we're going for 6,000 pennies," said third-grader Daniel McPherson, 8. "We're going to get him a big stuffed animal or something."
Daniel is a student in Tonya Waters' third-grade class, which has collected more than 160 pill bottles, each holding 25 pennies.
Timmy is described by his teacher and friends as a "lovable" redhead who lost his hair after chemotherapy treatment. He is the son of Mary and Neal Adams. They couldn't be reached for comment. Waters said she thinks they are with their son in Memphis, Tenn., where he went several days ago for cancer surgery.
"A lot of the kids last year had him in their second-grade classroom when he was diagnosed with cancer," Waters said. "He came to school this year and had a second go-round with it. When he left for surgery, the students decided during their class meeting they wanted to do a little something for him. They decided they would start a campaign: 2,000 Pennies for Timmy."
Waters said the entire school has participated, with pennies collected in a jar each morning between 7:20 and 7:45. But it's Timmy's 21 classmates who are running the fund-raising and every day count the pennies and put them in the pill bottles.
"We started putting out the jar Wednesday morning for the first time, and we're over 5,000 pennies already," Waters said. "We're going to collect all through next week."
The penny tally has been incorporated into math lessons.
"In the classroom we divide them up and put 25 in a pill bottle," Waters said, "so they're doing a lot of mathing, figuring out how many bottles equals six thousand. They'll be graphing it and all kind of math activities."
Counting the pennies for a purpose with a friend in mind has made the math stuff "a lot more fun for me anyway," said Tressa Thompson, 8. "I've been with Timmy since second grade. Well, he has red hair, and they've been giving him medicine and it made it all fall out. Stacy's mom ordered a pack of pill bottles. We put 25 pennies in each one and then we count it by 25 and at the end of each day we know how many we've got."
-- Mike Shields' phone message number is 832-7154. His e-mail address is mshields@ljworld.com.
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