Curt Smith

Lansing State Journal

DELHI TWP. — Flint residents coping without water for drinking, washing and cooking — many of them small children such as themselves — definitely has struck a chord with a few kids in Holt Public Schools.

And they’re working hard to do something about it.

Students from Washington Woods Middle School and Dimondale Elementary School have embarked on a campaign to fill a truck with more than 36,000 bottles of water for the people of Flint.

“Everybody’s talking about it,” fifth-grader Julia Toomey said, explaining how the group decided on the struggling community.

Gathered last week at the school, the students used words such as “yuck” and “disgusting” to describe Flint’s rust-colored water.

So now they’re selling ducks to raise the money while Meijer Inc., and the union representing its employees at the chain’s Lansing distribution center and area stores provide the water at a reduced cost and handle the shipping.

“It’s a nice little project and we’re looking forward to working with them on this,” Todd Regis, a vice president for United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 951 and its director of legislative and community affairs, said Friday.

“We think the creativity and ingenuity from these fourth- and fifth-graders is amazing,”

The students are Julia, Sawyer Hosford, Paige Lemmon, Cortney Morgan, Rodney Stewart, Lily Stroud and Nadia Weise. Lily attends Dimondale Elementary; the others go to Washington Woods and are former Dimondale students. They will sell the ducks at schools and various community events.

Julia said she got the idea of selling ducks when she saw a rubber duck on a table at home. With streams iced over, duck races were impossible. Races with “skating” and “sledding” ducks didn’t seem much easier.

So, the kids decided to sell them. They set up a GoFundMe page to generate money for the duck purchases and the truck full of water.

The plan was to buy rubber ducks for 30 cents each and sell them for $2 apiece. They hoped to raise $100 and it seemed formidable.

Surprise: The kids raised $100 on the first day.

“It was crazy,” Cortney said. “I didn’t think we were going to make it to $100.”

As of Monday morning the GoFundMe total was $1,379, more than halfway toward the $2,300 needed for a truckload of water. Another $243 was raised during a Boy Scout pig roast over the weekend.

And it’s all being recorded on a poster that now show a truck gradually being filled to the brim, Paige said.

Julia said the group is looking into fluoridated water because Flint’s leaded water causes teeth to decalcify.

The selling of ducks is a small but very important part of a larger endeavor. Their project is a part of a competition set up by Destination Imagination, a Cherry Hill, N.J., nonprofit group whose program is a “fun, hands-on system of learning that fosters students’ creativity, courage and curiosity,” according to its website.

Students anywhere from kindergarten through university level develop strategies for various problem-solving projects, carry them out as teams and discuss their efforts at a competition involving other teams.

More than 150,000 students participate in DI programs each year, the website says, and they’re supported by 38,000 volunteers.

There are 20 DI teams in Holt schools alone, said Megan Wert, a Washington Woods fifth-grade teacher and the district’s Destination Imagination coordinator.

So what makes this group different from the other 19?

“Other teams are doing both artistic and technical scientific challenges that address a certain requirement but are not necessarily giving back to the community,” Wert said.

“So this is a unique decision.”

Contact Curt Smith at (517) 377-1226 or csmith@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @CurtSmithLSJ.

On the Web

To donate: www.gofundme.com/truckofwater

www.gofundme.com/truckofwater A video presentation : http://youtu.be/aj4zJ0kcE6Q

: http://youtu.be/aj4zJ0kcE6Q Destination Imagination: www.destinationimagination.org/what-we-do/challenge-program

What's next