By Melanie Petrucci, Senior Community Reporter
Shrewsbury – Adele Fuzaylov and Sofiya Gonchrova are students to keep an eye on at Sherwood Middle School in Shrewsbury. The fifth-graders have been friends since the second grade when they were students at Floral Elementary School. These industrious 10-year-olds saw a problem and set out to solve it when they found it difficult to access playground equipment at recess after lunch – the only recess time during the day.
“Share the Spare” was created after several weeks of racing out to the playground after lunch to be one of the first to get to the playground equipment, only to find that they were often too late – as were many other students. There just weren’t enough to go around.
“We thought, ‘why don’t we make a project that would help our school become a better place for everyone,’” said Adele.
“Here’s the thing that really bothered me, unless there was a teacher involved no one could do anything to change the school. I didn’t think that was right. We are kids and we see something that the teachers don’t see and we have the creativity to create something different. And that’s how the idea started,” added Sofiya.
Often kids would be pushed or shoved and sometimes were physically hurt in the process of trying to get to the playground equipment. They didn’t think this was fair. They put their heads together and wrote a letter to school principal, Dr. Jane Lizotte, telling her about the problem and sharing some ideas on how they could solve it.
Initially, the girls thought that each class could get involved in collecting equipment but, after a brainstorming meeting with Dr. Lizotte, the girls then decided that the collection should be a contest between the fifth and sixth grades.
Students and their families were asked to look around their homes for gently used equipment such as soccer balls, basket balls, jump ropes, Frisbees and bouncy balls.
Sofiya said that they then got their classmates involved to make posters. Then announcements were made to advertise the week-long collection that took place the week between Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving.
The project resulted in almost 60 pieces of donated equipment. The fifth-graders led the way with 35 items while the sixth-grade class brought in 23. The winning grade received an extra 25 minutes of recess.
The girls were very happy with the outcome of their project.
“We would love to work on another project but we just need an idea,” Adele said, when asked if they had a future project lined up.
“We are so proud of Adele and Sofiya,” said their teacher Megan Graham. “They came up with this idea and implemented it 100 percent on their own…and were thrilled when the donations started coming in.”
“The Sherwood Middle School community continues to lead by example, as goodness permeates our school campus and beyond,” Lizotte noted.