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Outreach to Teach transforms Kansasville School
Posted: 4/20/2009 12:23:32 PM
Student WEA members Whitney Pfeifer and Katie Larson take a brief
break from painting a keyboard on the wall of the Kansasville School
library Sunday (April 19, 2009). The two were some of the 180
volunteers who swept through the school as part of the annual Student
WEA Outreach to Teach event.
With paint and sawdust covering hands, clothes and the occasional foot, 180 Student WEA members swept through the Kansasville School this past weekend undertaking more repairs than the school’s resident maintenance coordinator could do in three lifetimes.
“We’re doing so much it would take me 250 years to do everything were doing,” says Matt Stratton, physical education and health teacher at Kansasville School who also handles the school’s maintenance.
Stratton makes repairs on the school, parts of which are 100 years old, on nights and in the summer. The one-person operation is time-consuming (half of his summer is taken up just by stripping and waxing the small school’s floors) and some projects are pushed off as a result.
Enter Student WEA’s Outreach to Teach. The annual program sent a convoy of college students to Kansasville, an unincorporated village about 10 miles east of Burlington, to tear down and replace wainscoting, paint nearly every surface, create classroom decorations and make some repairs to doors and cabinets.
The Outreach to Teach volunteers sang along to boomboxes as they rolled paint, cut wood and sanded trim.
“I love the show ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ and when they said this was like a school edition of it, I was just ecstatic,” says Whitney Pfeifer, a Student WEA member who attends Wisconsin Lutheran College. “I’m like ‘Sign me up – I would love to try this.’”
Stratton, the Outreach to Teach project coordinator, says school officials in Kansasville were grateful for the eager workers giving their school a facelift.
“The school board has been in here and everything, and they’re just in awe,” Stratton says. “Everybody’s jaw is on the ground saying how hard everybody’s working and what’s getting accomplished and everybody’s positive attitude. It’s just unbelievable.”
Melissa Jeppesen, Student WEA secretary and Outreach to Teach coordinator, organized the 180 volunteers while applying for grants and soliciting donations for the event. The Wisconsin Lutheran College student says the enthusiasm for participation in Outreach was off the charts.
“Outreach to Teach is always a huge hit every year,” Jeppesen says. “We opened registration on a Friday and we were completely filled with people on a waiting list by Monday. We had to shut down the registration early because we had so many people, and there were still people who couldn’t come because they were on the waiting list. It was phenomenal the amount of people who want to help with Outreach.”
Students at the kindergarten through eighth-grade school moved the furniture out of the school in preparation for the Outreach volunteers. They came back to pictures of birthday cakes and computer keyboards on classroom walls.
“Having 180 people in here to replace all the wainscoting, to do all the sanding upstairs and re-varnishing, it’s going to make everything look so much better, brighter,” says Ron Brandt, Union Grove Area Education Association president who teaches fifth and sixth grade at Kansasville and served as the Outreach to Teach district coordinator for Kansasville. “Getting things painted just brightens up the rooms, and having these murals on the walls is just going to give a boost to the kids.”
