By: Echo Rogers
Pinwheels represent childhood happiness.
April is Child Abuse Prevention Month. That’s why during the month of April, Key Club will be selling pinwheels in the Hershey High School cafeteria to raise money to prevent child abuse. The fundraiser will also be held in the middle and elementary schools. Key Club is hoping to sell 250 of them for a $1 a piece. They also plan on having announcements explaining the purpose of these pinwheels.
Senior Hannah Paymer, President of Key Club, decided to sell pinwheels since her mother’s friend, Janet Morrow, use to hold this fundraiser in a school she taught at. Morrow and Paymer’s mothers are both in the Federated Women’s Club of Hershey. They too donate to this cause and wanted to get HHS involved as well.
Morrow used to hold this fundraiser at a school she taught in New Jersey. Her fundraiser touched the whole community. Teachers wore blue ribbons to raise awareness and students were able to take home their pinwheels to put in their yards.
Paymer, however, said that since this is their first year, Key Club will work on making this a school event first. Their idea, however, spread quickly. Both the elementary and middle school asked for a few pinwheels so they could sell them and donate to the prevention of child abuse as well.
The first thing Key Club did to spread awareness was bringing in Teresa Olsen, Director of the Prevent Child Abuse PA, to speak about this issue. In her speech Olsen explained about how to prevent child abuse, an overview of the Child Protective Service, and how it came to be.
She said that it’s all about preventing child abuse despite recent attempts to raise awareness by showing what child abuse can look like. Olsen said it’s not about scaring people, but to simply raise awareness, provide knowledge of how to handle children, and support the families.
One way Olsen hoped to raise awareness was to convince the superintendent and principal to institute a class called Cope24 in which the Federated Women’s Club of Hershey donated to HHS. This class came with ten video clips, each five minutes long and worksheets to do, but mostly it’s just a class to allow kids to talk about what parenting is like.
Even though, Olsen said, many kids in the high school won’t have children till later, many teenagers babysit. Overall, it’s just way to “know what to expect before you’re expecting,” Olsen said.
Besides this guest speaker, Key Club will also have announcements and are hoping to sell 250 pinwheels by the end of this month. Once they do, these pinwheels will line the roads outside the HHS and HMS.
“It’s just one more thing that happens to kids,” Paymer said. She and the rest of the club are hoping to change that by bringing awareness of child abuse. After the Key Club’s Walk for Clean Water, the club is planning on turning all their attention to this issue.
Next year, Paymer hopes the club will continue this event and possibly bring this issue to the rest of community. As Paymer said of discussing child abuse, “It’s taboo.” She’s hoping to change that so this problem can be prevented for future students.
