Published Friday, January 31, 2003
Herald Staff Writer
The state no longer requires school students to learn sewing, but Suzie O'Leary wants her charges to know the basics.
So, when Superintendent Richard R. Rubano Jr. asked her to help the Kiwanis Club of Farrell with a service project to make stuffed dolls, she agreed.
The Kiwanis Club paid for materials, said Rubano, club president.
The dolls were donated to UPMC Horizon's Farrell and Greenville hospitals and to Sharon Regional Health System, so they can be given to children.
Jeremy Archie, a ninth-grader from Farrell, said the dolls' final destination made the project special to him.
"I liked doing this for the community and knowing I was doing something for someone else," Jeremy said.
Jeremy spent a lot of free time working on the dolls and making sure other students did a good job, often correcting things he thought could be done better, said Ms. O'Leary, who teaches family and consumer science, the successor to home economics.
About 100 students in grades seven through 12 helped fashion the 100 dolls by making and pinning the patterns, cutting out the material and stuffing the dolls.
The dolls are unadorned, but the children who receive them will also get markers to put faces and other garnishments on them, Rubano said.
Ms. O'Leary, who handled the sewing but plans to introduce her students to needles and thread later, said it was the first community service project her classes have been involved in. She does not want it to be the last.
"We're going to try to have something like this every year," she said. "It was a real big success. They (students) really enjoyed it."
Ed Newmeyer, director of marketing and public relations for SRHS, said the dolls were delivered Wednesday to the emergency care center.
A visit to the ER can be traumatic for a child, and the dolls should help them relax and take their minds off their troubles, he said.
"It just gives kids something to do while they're anxiously awaiting the tests or whatever they're there for," he said.
Albert Boland, community relations specialist for UPMC Horizon, has seen the therapeutic benefits of dolls and other such toys from his time as a paramedic, when they were stocked on ambulances.
"Children who are in pain and fearful of the unknown are comforted by dolls and items like that that take their minds off it," he said.
At UPMC, the dolls will be given to children admitted to the hospital and those brought into the ER. They are in stock at Farrell and Boland said he hoped to pick them up for Greenville Thursday.