Keeping Tabs On A Million Tiny School Takes Six Years To Collect Aluminum Tabs For Ronald Mcdonald House

What do you do with a million pop can tabs?

Well, you figure out how big a pile they’ll make. And, of course, you bury yourself in them.

Then you give them to the Ronald McDonald House.

But you don’t do it overnight.

Students at the tiny Onion Creek School, in the mountains about 18 miles north of Colville, spent six years collecting the million aluminum can tabs they donated to the Ronald McDonald House on Thursday.

The tabs fetched $515 for the charity, which provides a place to stay for out-oftown families of sick children staying in Spokane hospitals.

“It makes us feel really good,” said fifth-grader Eli Mead.

The project was worth far more to the school than $515. It has provided lessons in math, English, community service and perseverance.

Special needs teacher Ruth Wolberg came up with the idea of collecting a million of something in 1989 when she had difficulty getting a student to understand large numbers. Several charts showing one-sixteenth of a million dots just didn’t work.

Wolberg conferred with Sharon John, who teaches first through third grades, and they decided to collect pop can tabs after rejecting bread loaf wrapper tabs as too difficult to get and too flat.

Fourth-grader Sarah Ashworth said no one thought the project would take more than a year. Some figured a couple of months, and a few even said less than a month.

“That would be hard,” said third-grader Nathan Jones. “It would take a thousand every two minutes.”

Hmmmmm. OK, that was a guess, Nathan admitted.

It’s the thought that counts, and Onion Creek’s 60 students spent a lot of time thinking about those million can tabs.

They put a thousand tabs on a string, separated with note cards to show decimal values and then guessed how much the string weighed.

First-grader Jamie Sapp said he was just guessing when he said 200 pounds.

But fourth-grader Lindsey James hefted several big handfuls to come up with her 11-pound estimate. She thinks she’d have been closer to the correct answer - about 1 pound - if the note cards and string hadn’t added so much weight.

The can tabs also inspired writing exercises. One creative-writing project was to imagine what it would be like if the tabs were something else.

Sixth-grader Adrienne Pruett didn’t relish the idea of cleaning up after that many cats, especially after they had kittens, but “the good thing is they are soft and lovable.”

It could be worse. Third-grader Victoryia Ofide supposed she’d be dead if she had a million spiders. Not one to give up, though, Victoryia said she’d pray a lot for God to keep those spiders away from her.

The good thing about a million spiders, she wrote, is “I will not be bored because I will be talking to the spiders and they will be my friend.”

And then there was the writing contest for a chance to crawl in the school’s conversation pit after it was filled with can tabs to a depth of 21 centimeters. (Yes, guessing the depth was another contest.)

“I would like it because I can jump on a million and flip somersaults,” wrote first-grader Elizabeth Legg, who did exactly that.

Eli Mead won the essay contest among older students. He imagined he’d look good in metal - “a Kodak (or Polaroid) moment” - and he might be able to destroy a certain pair of jeans he hates.

Besides, Eli wrote, “What kid wouldn’t want to be buried neck deep in something so closely related to soda?”

One of the project’s first lessons was how daunting it is to collect and count a million of anything. When hand counting proved too timeconsuming, teacher Joel Anderson helped students determine the average weight of a thousand tabs so they could be “counted” with a scale.

After collecting 50,000 tabs in the first year, some quick math showed the task would take 20 years at that rate. So some of the younger students wrote letters soliciting help in the fall of 1990. Tabs started pouring in after one of the letters was published in The SpokesmanReview’s “Action Corner” column.

A number of families and groups, including the Ladies of the Eagles in Coeur d’Alene, adopted the project and collections doubled in the second year.

In the summer of 1992, the Hawaii Kai Baptist Preschool heard about the project from someone in Spokane and collected 258,000 tabs. A Hawaiian bank paid the shipping cost, which probably exceeded the recycling value of the aluminum.

The drive ended this year when the Coeur d’Alene Ladies of the Eagles persuaded the Post Falls School District to contribute 130,000 tabs from an aborted effort to collect a million.

Onion Creek Superintendent Dawn Hart thinks one of the reasons her school succeeded when others failed is the fact that each class has up to three grades.

“The kids are used to things that take a long-term focus,” she said.

Hart predicted the school will launch another ambitious project after savoring its victory awhile.