By: Lily Amback / News & Opinion Editor and Lydia Styf / Staff writer
A dream is a wish your heart makes, according to Disney. But, Disney is not the only place fulfilling dreams. For their senior service learning project, seniors Brooke Tanksley and Taylor Burke decided to help kids in the special needs classrooms at New Pal pursue their dreams.
The concept behind this project was to give the special education kids the “day of their dreams,” hence Dream Day. To accomplish this, Tanksley and Burke sent home with the kids a sheet to fill out about what a Dream Day would look like for them. Then, they set about raising money for these Dream Days. In October, they held a dine-in-donate at Culver’s and raised around $500 to use as they wish.
“ We hosted a dine and donate at Culver’s in October, and we actually worked it,” Tanksley said. “Like, they gave us aprons and stuff and we took the food out to all the people and I’m not sure what percentage of the money went to us, but we ended up raising about $500 to help pay for these things,”
They have already completed a few Dream Days, such as a golf cart scavenger hunt and a courtside Pacers game. In fact, two people wrote that they would like to ride in a golf cart for their Dream Day.
“In the fall, we organized this golf cart ride around the school and the school let us use their golf carts, but we made it a scavenger hunt. So then we had all these stops and we had volunteers where we’d stop and we’d throw baseballs at the baseball field and then we’d go to the football field and they’d run a touchdown,” Tanksley said.
While the golf cart scavenger hunt was during the school day, the Pacers game was an after school treat.
“We got tickets donated to us by a local company to go to the Pacers game with Ashton (Pero, one of the students…and we got courtside passes to go at the beginning to watch them warm up,” Burke said.
After the game, they even got to go into the autograph room and meet some of the players.
Tanksley and Burke are planning ahead for the rest of these Dream Days. One that they hoped to have around Christmas time had to be postponed to the spring, but they are still hopeful it will be a success.
“For the zoo trip, we were going to go to Christmas at the Zoo, but that ended up not working out for us, so we’re going to have to schedule that again in the spring, so that’s going to be the student, me, Brooke, and his mom going on that trip, which will be really fun,” Burke said.
Not only are they planning to do this zoo trip, but they are also hoping to get one student tickets to Holiday World and for another student, a night out at Olive Garden.
“I knew going into this (service learning) class that I really wanted to do something with the special ed community in New Pal. So, I knew I wanted it to be something along the lines of helping our classroom. Also, a few members of my family have disabilities, so seeing them thrive through events like this that we do. My aunt has a disability and she does music therapy and we take her on vacation sometimes, and just to see how her face lights up, when she goes and does that stuff, it makes me want to give other students the opportunity to have that joy, and then, my mom is a special education teacher, so going into her classroom has made me want to do this project,” Burke said.
