Juniper School is serving as the headquarters for a program that is setting out to collect enough aluminum beverage can tabs to purchase a transport wheelchair for School District of Mystery Lake (SDML) students with injuries who need help getting around at school.
The goal is to collect 1,700 pounds of the tabs by next May to purchase a $1,000 wheelchair via the tabs for wheelchairs program, says Juniper School resource teacher Audrey McLellan. That’s a total of 2,550,000 tabs.
“A student in our school broke her leg and we didn’t have a wheelchair so we had to borrow one from the someone from the community,” says Grade 7 student Debby Olubowe, who is a member of the tabs for wheelchairs committee along with McLellan, Juniper School principal Lucy Mayor, SDML student services administrator Jolene Brown and Thompson Recycling Centre manager Billie Joe Thompson. “We realized we didn’t have any for school district so that’s why we’re collecting tabs.”
“Not too long after that a second girl broke her leg and needed a chair,” McLellan says. “She ended up borrowing one from us and it’s kind of a makeshift chair. It’s one of those computer trolleys … and then a small chair has been welded into it.”
Mayor has been collecting tabs at the school for a few years and having them taken to a school in Winnipeg to donate to their tabs for wheelchairs programs.
“Then we found out could that we could do our own campaign so that’s when we decided to give it a try and see how it would go,” said McLellan, who said she knows of two other tabs for wheelchairs programs in Manitoba. “Ours is now the third.”
The cooperation and support of the recycling centre is essential to the program, since the facility can store the tabs for the school until they have the necessary amount – more than three bales of 500 pounds each – and also because they have found a buyer for the tabs and can transport them down south.
“That helps to support our shipping costs because we put our stuff in with the bales that are going to Winnipeg with the Thompson Recycling Centre,” McLellan said.
The wheelchair the program is intended to purchase was selected in consultation with the Rehabilitation Centre for Children and an occupational therapist and physiotherapist who work with the school district, McLellan says.
“This chair’s going to be available to any child in the district who needs it,” McLellan says.
Though collection began just earlier this month, the campaign has already collected about 40 pounds of tabs and McLellan says there were already about seven places collecting tabs for the school before, including the Salvation Army.
“People just happened to bring them but now that we have an official campaign, I think we’re going to get more,” McLellan says.
Posters have been produced to advertise the campaign and to decorate collection jars and if the goal is achieved, future plans include collections for the purchase of other specialized equipment.
“The idea is that our committee would meet once a year and then decide what our campaign for the next year would be, so we met a couple of weeks ago and we chose the transport chair,” says McLellan.
Olubowe, who is a member of the Juniper School student council as well as its Green Team, says this isn’t the only fundraising she and her fellow students are involved in.
“We’re also fundraising for We Day and we’re trying to fundraise $5,000 between this year and next year for a community in Kenya to build a well,” she says, adding that her involvement in volunteering comes from “the feeling that a lot of people didn’t get what we get or just the feeling to want to help.”
It’s a lofty goal but McLellan is confident that community support will help the program achieve it.
“We set it at this chair because we feel this is achievable,” she said. “I think we’ll get there.”
