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Blog Entry 21 of 51 The Lakewood Lowdown
Hi, I'm Erin Feese, a community journalist here at YourHub.com.
As journalists, we are always seeking to uncover the newsy, the exciting, the weird and the heartwarming stories going on around us. The greatest part of YourHub.com is that you can be the one to tell your story. In this blog you'll find highlights of the Lakewood and Edgewater sites, as well as the musings of your friendly neighborhood journalist. So go ahead, uncover what's going on around you, and don't be afraid to share what you find.

Blog Url: http://denver.yourhub.com/~HideandSeek

Pennies, paperclips and the power of education

Contributed by: Erin Feese/YourHub.com   on 8/8/2007

For thousands of local kids, the arrival of August means their days of summer vacation are numbered. It will soon be time to load up their backpacks, sharpen their No. 2 pencils and head off to school.

Although the students may not be thrilled, we here at YourHub.com are excited about school starting up again, because many of are best stories are generated by classroom activities.

One of the most memorable stories from the last school year is how Sharon Coffman's class at Vivian Elementary in Lakewood collected pennies to learn about the Holocaust. A Denver synagogue began the " six million pennies project" to remember the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

When I spoke to the Rabbi Yisroel Engel about the project, he said the idea was inspired by a school in rural Tennessee that set out to collect six million paperclips in 1998. While learning about the Holocaust, the students had a hard time grasping how much six million is, so the school decided to collect six million of something.

Since hearing about it, I was intrigued to learn more about this paperclip project and so I (finally!) watched the documentary Paperclips last week.

It was a wonderful film. I learned that the one of the reasons the students decided to collect paperclips was because they were a symbol used to by the Norwegians to show solidarity with their Jewish neighbors during World War II. Once the word got out about the paperclip project, people from all over the world began sending the school paperclips, often accompanied with the heartbreaking stories of how their relative or friend was killed. They school ended up with well over 20 million paperclips that they made into a memorial in an old railcar shipped from Germany. I hope to be able to visit it someday.

Watching the tearful interviews with the school's principal, I could see how much the project touched the whole town, as I'm sure the pennies project impacted the community of Lakewood. It all comes down to education -- I believe that prejudice, hate and intolerance can be conquered through learning, and it all starts in the classroom. (Another wonderful example of the power of education is the book T he Freedom Writers Diary -- I highly recommend giving it a read.)

I know there are great things going on at our local schools, and I can't wait to hear more about them!

For some insight about stereotypes, read Courtney Erker's column here.


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