The annual Plouffe Academy Spare Change fundraiser raised more than $1,500 this year, for the Enterprise Helping Hands Fund and for a veterans' charity started by a Plouffe student.

BROCKTON – Zeke Lemieux’s classmates at Plouffe Academy are paying it forward this year, helping Zeke help veterans.

Zeke, a Plouffe sixth grader, inspired his classmates to donate half the money raised from their annual Spare Change fundraiser to a charity he started called High Fives for Soldiers.

The school’s donation will put his charity’s fundraising total at more than $5,000, which all goes to Paws 4 Vets, a non-profit organization that connects service dogs with veterans who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Zeke started collecting nickels for his cause in October 2015, and began getting larger donations through the mail and through a GoFundMe page.

His goal is $10,000, because that’s how much Paws 4 Vets asks veterans to “pay it forward” and donate, after receiving their own service dog.

Zeke said Wednesday that veterans deserve “anything we can give them.”

“Veterans are risking their lives so we can have a normal day, and they don’t have to do that,” he said. “They don’t expect anything in return, but they deserve more than just the gift of helping people. They’ve sacrificed everything they have for everything that we have.”

While Zeke was collecting nickels for his cause, the rest of his school was also collecting change, for their annual fundraiser.

Zeke’s math teacher, Elizabeth Mency, started the Spare Change fundraiser at Plouffe eight years ago.

She teaches two sixth grade math classes each year, and turned the fundraiser into a lesson for the sixth grade students.

“We’re supposed to focus on real-world math,” Mency said, “so we just do this with real numbers instead of made-up numbers.”

For the past six days, her classes have been counting all the change collected by the school last week.

Mency said she didn’t know about Zeke’s charity project until he missed a few days of school earlier this year to speak to veterans in North Carolina.

Once she and the students found out, though, Mency said Zeke’s classmates wanted to help High Fives for Soldiers.

Half of the $1,546 raised will go to the Enterprise Helping Hands Fund, while the other half will go to High Fives for Soldiers.

“It feels great that a lot of people I know really care about this,” Zeke said. “I realized what I’m doing is changing lives, and they’re helping me change lives.”

His mother, Janis Lemieux, said the success of High Fives for Soldiers is exciting “for a lot of reasons.”

She said she is proud Zeke is setting goals for himself and working towards them, but she is also happy to see the impact his charity has on veterans.

“He’s getting responses of people telling him this is the first time they have hope again,” she said. “I don’t think he can fully get that yet, but I think one day, he will.”