Over 500 pairs of jeans are stacked up in Mrs. Palmer’s classroom for the Teens for Jeans fundraiser. Photo by Heather Kim.
By Nicole Tieu, staff writer
One of the first things a student walking into room 125 may notice is piles and piles of folded jeans collected around the shelves on the side of the classroom. Since December, English teacher Stephanie Palmer and her class have been able to collect over 500 pairs of jeans to send to homeless teenagers across America through the Teens for Jeans campaign.
“Everybody has like a couple pair of jeans that they don’t wear anymore and they can’t pass them on to their siblings,” Dominic Nguyen (’15) stated. “Instead of leaving them around, might as well bring them in for somebody else to use.”
The project was sparked through Palmer’s involvement in the Teacher Challenge, a group of teachers within the school district aiming to better themselves as educators. The December challenge was to have a community service project in the classes. Palmer then took the initiative to bring it up to her classes and begin sowing the seeds for a new campaign.
“I think the kids are pretty proud of themselves, just proud that they can contribute to people who have less,” said Palmer. “They’ve watched the stacks grow and grow and grow and I think that creates a sense of accomplishment.”
After finding that the one thing homeless teenagers request the most is a pair of jeans, the class decided to choose Teen for Jeans as the program they wanted to support for their community service project. Through DoSomething.org, an organization for spreading social change among youth, the class is able to send the pairs of jeans they collected to the teenagers who need them.
For some students, the project had made an impact on their views of the world or created a sense of accomplishment.
“Giving jeans to people who don’t have what we have was a way to just say ‘hey we’re here for you, we understand you,’” said Kyla Roberts (‘15). “ Basically we just wanted to give from the heart. I think that’s what the project was all about.”
A class competition was started and the whiteboard in Palmer’s room now shows each class period with tally marks representing the amount of jeans they brought in. Without any set goals, the class continues to bring in more jeans as well as asking relatives and other students within the school to bring in their own gently-used jeans as well.
Brittany Bancroft (‘15) said, “I think we just wanted to collect as many as we could without really a set goal. We all tried to just come together to collect a bunch to donate to [the teenagers].”
