Students inspired to help

ANAMOSA - A shared experience has led students at West Middle School in Anamosa to help earthquake victims in Haiti.

The Anamosa students say they feel connected to the earthquake survivors after a group of sixth graders had their classroom ceiling collapse on them last month.

No one was hurt at the middle school, but the scare left its mark. Now the students want to do all they can for the people of Haiti, even if it means giving the clothes off their backs.

“We had a tenth or a millionth of what they would have experienced,” sixth-grade teacher Marissa Nie said, but the incident was still enough to get students thinking about how they could help.

“We have everything that we need,” sixth grader Reese Ehlers said. “But they need some stuff that we have too much of.”

One item the Anamosa students had in abundance, they decided, was T-shirts. So they started putting up signs and asking for donations of spare shirts. After a week, they'd collected about 800 of them.

“They are willing to see that other people are in positions that aren't anything similar to ours and wanting to help them out,” Nie said.

Students donated shirts for both children and adults. Most of the shirts say “Anamosa” or “West Middle School”. Sixth grader Gabriel Finn says he hopes that reminds people in Haiti how much Iowans care.

“The coolest ones are the ones that say ‘Anamosa,' because then they know that a little town in Iowa was helping out with this tragic disaster,” he said.

Nie said she's been impressed by her students and others at West. For the past week, some of them have volunteered to stay after school and pick up boxes of shirts from different classrooms.

Nie said generosity and service are values she learned during her time in Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids. She said it's great to see her own lessons being reflected in her students.

“To be able to graduate and take that into my workplace is just remarkable,” she said.

The students are collecting T-shirts until Friday, but the school is having some trouble finding a way to get them to Haiti. If you can help with transport or would like to donate, head to the news links section at www.KCRG.com for more information.

By Jillian Petrus, KCRG-TV9