A Moosonee Public School (MPS) teacher promised to shave his head if the students surpassed their goal of raising $1,000 for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
The school took part in the Jump Rope for Heart movement and over the two-week period, the students raised $1,672.
As an incentive for students to achieve their fundraising goal, the Grade 6 teacher and event organizer William McArthur promised to shave his head. Now that the goal has been met, he said he’ll be shaving his hair in the next few months once the number of COVID-19 cases in the community goes down.
“With the pandemic, it’s been hard to do whole-school activities and bring everyone together because we’re so divided up in our own classrooms. I just wanted to create a fun distraction for the students," McArthur said. "I think we achieved that this year, it was nice being able to give back to the Heart and Stroke Foundation.”
Currently, the school is ranked 14th across the country for the amount of money raised, according to McArthur. Students will also receive freezies as prizes.
When deciding what incentive to use, McArthur asked around about what had been done in previous years.
“It was either like tape a principal to the wall or throw a pie in the teacher’s face. And I was like, ‘You know what, shaving my head is easy enough.’ I’ve done it before, so it’s something I can do to make the goal a little bit easier to get,” he said. “I know my Grade 6 class would love to see my hair being shaven.”
The program was open to any interested students from kindergarten to Grade 8. This year, the event was virtual and any activities had to be done at home or outside of students’ houses.
Students were encouraged to ask friends and family to virtually raise money.
On the Jump Rope Day, which took place for MPS students on May 21, the school delivered jump ropes to the families that requested them. Each class was given different activities and videos for students to follow along individually at home.
“We also posted non jump rope activities like dancing, yoga, jumping and athletics. That was a fun day,” McArthur said.
Once the students signed up for participation, they were also asked to choose one of the four healthy habit streaks that included avoiding sugary drinks, being active for one hour or more, eating fruit and vegetables or limiting screen time to less than two hours. Each day, students would do one of these activities and count their streak.
“The point of the fundraiser is to encourage healthy and active living, so that's a way of doing that to encourage to come back each day and add a day to their streak,” McArthur said.
