When Life Gives You Lemons, Have a Penny War!

School may feel like a battlezone sometimes, but Saint Thomas Aquinas Regional School took their students’ complaints about the middle school hallway seriously...or rather, their Robotics team did. The announcement of the beginning of the Penny War on October 16, 2017, marked the beginning of the most competitive fundraiser known to man.

Cut back a week to Thursday, October 12th. The Aquinas Robotics Team, comprised of eighth graders Mahreen Ahmed, Emory Butler, Soneha Datta, Betty Phan, Anastasia Rao, and Emma Youngblood are contemplating their Robotics project. The theme of the competition is Hydrodynamics, which meant that it would (naturally) be about water. More specifically, better ways to find, transport, use, or dispose of water. A bit of progress had been made. The team had miraculously agreed on the theme of using water. Hurricane water. Inspired by Hurricane Maria, which crashed into Puerto Rico like a wave to shore and devastated the entire island, the team decided to focus on helping the weary survivors get clean water. They had lost everything, and many were just taking their chances and drinking and bathing with dirty, parasite-infested water.
Perhaps they couldn’t directly help rebuild villages, but they could indirectly provide them life, mainly, through clean water. The main part of the project had already been completed: a 3-D model of a bucket with a filtration system. The second part of the project was a bit trickier: provide a Hurricane Maria relief program, ISER Caribe, with water filters to help their cause. Their volunteers traveled all over the island, transporting food, water, and other basic necessities to Hurricane Survivors. The hard part was buying the filters, as the robotics team was comprised of schoolchildren with no stable jobs.
The group sat in silence, staring at each other, racking their brains for awareness and fundraiser ideas. The STEM students are, for once, stumped. All hope seems lost. There is no way. Might as well give up. That certainly seems to be the mood until—
“How about we do a fundraiser here at Aquinas?”
There is a pause. This is a good start. But then the question arises—
“Yeah, but what will we do?”
There is a pause where the six eighth graders take a moment to think. Their instructor speaks up,
“How about a Penny War?”
The suggestion is greeted by blank silence as the idea sinks in. Then, gasps and squeals and a chorus of “Yes!” sounds around the room. Their instructor, Ms. Kathleen Walsh, hands them a piece of paper and tells them to get writing. Someone suggests poster boards be hung up. Inspiration finally hits them in the face. Hope hasn’t been lost after all!
The rules of the Penny War were simple: it would be a school-wide event, putting homeroom against homeroom. Pennies were positive, counting toward your score. However, other coins, such as silvers (nickels, dimes, and quarters), bills, and checks were negative, detracting from your score.The winner (the classroom with the least negatives), would win a pizza party. This incentive turned the usually friendly and amicable homerooms into adversaries. And boy, did they take this seriously! During their Friday free periods, between classes, and at any other spare times, gaggles of middle schoolers and even elementary students were all around the school, dropping everything from nickels to hundred dollar bills into opposing jars.
Now, if you asked a student why they dropped twenty-five dollar bills into every single homeroom jar that was not theirs, they might answer, “I want a pizza party.” But there is always a deeper motive, a more pure and moral one. Every student's is the same: “I want to help Puerto Rico.” You could see it in their eyes and their behavior, the way the middle schoolers pursed their lips and frowned whenever Hurricane Maria is mentioned, or the wide eyes and sorrowful looks of the younger elementary schoolers, and the way both groups cheered and screamed and said, “Woah!” when the final amount, four thousand four hundred six dollars and seventy six cents, was announced on Monday, October 23, a week after the homeroom competition was over.
It was a very fruitful penny war, and the Robotics team was able to buy thirty-six water filters from Sawyer filters for ISER Caribe and, mainly, the survivors of Puerto Rico. They had managed to contact a salesman from Sawyer, a gentleman named Kevin, on Saturday, October 28, who gave them a demonstration of the filters, all of which worked extremely well, filtering out everything from chunks of dirt and the smallest bacteria.
The Robotics team exchanged content smiles in class. They may be just six people--six kids at that--but perhaps they’ve changed the world more than they could’ve ever imagined.