Sewickley Students Reach Out To Soldiers

This past fall, senior Lauren Tancer initiated a project to send letters to members of the Air Force who were deployed overseas. She came up with the idea after an Air Force Reserve (AFR) Teen Leadership Council leader showed her a website about making a difference on 9/11.

“My dad and step-mom are both in the Air Force and my Dad deployed the first week of September,” Lauren said. “I knew my dad would just be arriving to his location on September 11 and I knew letters would make them feel a little bit more at home.”

Lauren is a member of the Air Force Reserve Teen Leadership Council, a nationwide group of AFR dependent teens created in 2010 that provides a youth perspective in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of AFR youth programs. 

With Lauren’s leadership, every Sewickley Academy student, Pre-K through Grade 12, wrote letters and drew pictures for our service men and women overseas.  A friend of Lauren’s from another school, also a member of the AFR Teen Leadership Council, generated about 500 letters from her school.  In total, Lauren sent approximately 1,400 letters to her father, who gave them out to the men and women from his base and other units.

“When I started the project, I didn't want to make the letters generic,” said Lauren. “I encouraged each student to write about what they wanted to talk about, so they wrote about the Steelers, the Pirates, and their own school sports teams.”

On December 5th, Master Sergeant Gary J. Rihn, who is deployed to an undisclosed location in southwest Asia, sent an email and photo to Sewickley Academy thanking students for the letters.

Born and raised in the North Hills area of Pittsburgh, he wrote: “What a fresh shot of energy from ‘home’ as I read through all of the letters, with all of the Pittsburgh references! Please extend a heartfelt thank you to all of the students who took the time to write to us. Yes, it really does matter and is much appreciated.”

After learning about the letter and photo from Sergeant Rihn, Lauren commented, “I think it made the project successful. We were able to make at least one person smile in a situation where smiling isn't something that happens frequently.”

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This article was submitted by Sewickley Academy. Have news you'd like to share with Patch readers? Email information and photos to Sewickley Patch Editor Larissa Dudkiewicz at larissa.dudkiewicz@patch.com.