PITTSBURG, Kan. — Lakeside Elementary fifth-grader Noah Vaughn got a special letter last week, which no doubt means letters to about 300 other Lakeside students aren’t far behind.
The students are under the tutelage of Bridget Johnson, the school’s enthusiastic health/art teacher. She knows how important it is to receive mail, especially if the recipients are either children or troops serving overseas.
Johnson, a Fort Scott native, had just started high school when the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place. She lost a cousin serving in Afghanistan six years ago, and she has an uncle now serving with the 226th Engineer Company.
When Johnson learned that her uncle was to be deployed for the third time, she wanted to send him homemade art from her students. But when she went to the troops’ send-off, she saw lots of young people saying goodbye — to parents, aunts, uncles, and even some young men with whom she went to high school.
“I knew that I could do much, much more than what I had originally planned and have an impact on many more lives than first anticipated,” she said.
“In December, I spoke with my kindergarten students about what our local National Guard unit would be going through. We’d been talking about stress and the effect it has on the body. I can’t think about a more stressful job (than serving in the military).”
The children decided it would be neat to send soldiers a box of “snow” from their home state.
Johnson folded more than 100 squares of paper and let the students cut away at them to create snowflakes. She gave them an option: They could write their names on the flakes and keep them for themselves, or they could put them in a “soldier pile.”
Almost all of the kindergartners chose to put theirs in the pile. Johnson was ecstatic.
Students asked if they could send every art project they create to soldiers.
So Johnson began a pen pal program. Out of about 400 students at Lakeside, she sent 336 projects/letters to the troops. The children created their handprints holding red paper hearts — and somewhere in Afghanistan, those now decorate soldiers’ quarters.
The first batch went out on Feb. 18, and Johnson told the students it probably would be mid-March when they would begin receiving letters from soldiers in return.
In a first-floor hallway, Johnson created a large, camouflage-backed bulletin board with maps of the United States and Afghanistan, using a piece of yarn to create the path the mail has to travel. She’ll use stickers to keep track of the soldiers’ hometowns.
“This project includes a little geography, a little global awareness, a little practice of writing skills, a little art — and it hopefully shows students that by communicating, they can relieve their own stress and that of others,” Johnson said.
In teaching health, she travels from classroom to classroom, and each time she enters carrying a box, the students exclaim, “Are those our letters?”
As for Noah, he was thrilled to receive an answer to his letter, a letter that told about his spelling bee, his daily life and how much he misses the soldier to whom he was writing: his dad.
