MONCTON — Thousands of pennies are pouring into Karen Horsman’s classroom at Riverview Junior High since a campaign called Power of the Penny started a couple of weeks ago to raise Holocaust awareness.
Grade 8 students at Riverview Junior High, in a suburb of Moncton, are trying to collect six million pennies to memorialize the Jews lost in the Holocaust. [Josee Durepos photo]
Early in this school term, Horsman’s Grade 8 class responded to an assigned book, set in World War II Warsaw, and to a documentary called Paper Clips about a group of Tennessee students who collected six million clips to represent those who died in the Holocaust.
“The children are extremely interested in collecting six million pennies, one for each of the victims,” said Horsman in a telephone interview. “We have really gotten the word out to the media and have been very successful so far.”
She says they hope to have boxes they can distribute to businesses and workplaces around the community, but they also realize that to reach their goal they are going to have to reach out beyond Metro Moncton.
The English language arts teacher said she and the students spent one recent lunch hour rolling 8,500 pennies. “If we get that every day, it might take us three years,” she laughed. “However, the students are committed. Even those who will be gone from this school by the time the project ends want to be part of it all the way through its completion.”
The students have already collected more than 75,000 pennies. In addition to what they’ll collect and have donated in their own community, they hope for contributions from pop superstars, such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift and others, to whom they have written letters seeking support. They’ll display pennies from celebrities throughout the school.
Horsman said the idea really came from the students after reading the story of the atrocities and of the paper clip project.
“They wanted to do something relevant,” she said.
The goal is to raise $60,000, which would be used for a student trip to Poland to visit Holocaust sites. Horsman said they want to return from that trip and educate others about what happened.
“Most of them didn’t know a lot about the Holocaust, and some still don’t know very much, but this project is stressing empathy to them, and helping them understand history,” she said.
“We’ve even turned it into a writing project, where the students studied the newspaper article about the paper clips [project in Tennesee] and analyzed how it was written, using the five Ws [who, what, when, why, where] of a news story. That even led to more conversation about the Holocaust. It’s been an excellent project so far.”