Longtime teacher still enjoys pitching in for community
By William Zilke, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: April 3, 2008
In everyone's life, there is one teacher who has helped you in your journey through life.
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It could be an art or music teacher who encouraged your talent when even your own family members doubted you had any. It could be that math teacher, who with one explanation about simple subtraction, opened the maze of a science that was as puzzling to you as quantum physics.
Or it could be a teacher like Haggerty Elementary School's Karen White- Twigg.
Not every situation in life fits neatly into a textbook.
Life's questions are answered by your actions, not by multiple choices on an exam paper.
White-Twigg and Linda Maxwell, fourth-grade teachers at Haggerty, sat down in August of last year and brainstormed a project for their students to get involved with the community that they live in.
Not just as the fourth-grade students they are but as vital, contributing members of their township and nearby Belleville.
"Over my years in Van Buren I noticed that students really never interacted with their community. Our community has given us help but students never reciprocated," she said.
"This coupled with my strong feeling that everyone can help their community in some way gave birth to my idea of the Community Helper's Club."
Last week, 10 of her Community Helpers purchased the necessary materials and created 100 washcloth bunnies for the residents of Belleville's Columbia Court, the city's senior apartment complex on West Columbia.
"We saw the idea in a magazine for the bunnies," White- Twigg said.
"It took a couple hours and the Community Helpers gave up their lunch and recess times to make them."
While the school year is slowly winding down, the Community Helpers are hardly through with their service for the year.
And a busy one it's been for them.
Aside from keeping their grades up, the group did centerpieces at Columbia Court for Thanksgiving and designed and painted the holiday mural on the Belleville Area Chamber of Commerce windows.
White-Twigg discusses possible projects with the children and lets them decide which idea they'd like to run with.
While as a teacher, she is nurturing and supportive of her class, she also lets them make decisions rather than impose projects fourth graders are likely to become bored with or not see the overall, positive effects these astonishing young people do.
Painting the mural quickly appealed to the fourth graders.
"At the first meeting in October the student club members got together and brainstormed ideas that they might use on the window," she said.
"The mural is a compilation of several of their ideas. Everyone of them worked on it and they had a ball."
With events like Belleville's annual Flower Day or any other project involving beautifying the community- and putting flags on the graves of American veterans at Hillside Cemetery coming up, the Community Helpers also are planning to enter the American Cancer Society Relay for Life event.
Whatever materials the Community Helpers need they raise for themselves or White- Twigg simply pays for herself.
"We're planning on decorating clay pots for gardening later in the spring," she said.
"The students can paint and decorate the pots as they wish."
If you have a local community project, words of encouragement for the students or ideas for financial assistance contact White- Twigg at 697-8483.
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