How a Panhandle High School connected to children in far-off high schools with needle and thread
BEAVER, Okla. (KFOR) – One of the best sounds for Family and Consumer Science teachers like Nancy McVay can hear, is the ‘whir’ of sewing machines, as students are busy stitching their assignments.
Senior Logan Yeomans recalls his first time sitting at a sewing machine, “At first,” he thought, “Wow! We’re going to sew?”
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At Beaver High School, for the past 12 years, the project is always the same. Pillowcases, at least three from every student, and more if possible.
Senior Parker Fitts described the learning process, “At first we made little pillows and stuffed them,” she says.
“It’s for a grade,” states McVay of her sewing assignment. “They have to finish the seams on the inside.”
It’s a good project to teach the art of sewing, but, Mrs. McVay has a higher purpose in mind. Thanks to prompting from another ‘Duster,’ Linda Downing, who brought the idea of making colorful pillowcases for young hospital patients to her classroom door.
“A lady in Philadelphia had a son who was dying of cancer,” she relates the original idea. “Finally, she went home and made him a bright pillowcase.”
Back then, she was just asking for a little stitch of help.
McVay says she was sewing them herself at first.
“Linda knew I sewed,” she says.
Panhandle residents appreciate the elbow room most of the time, but occasionally complain about feeling isolated as Oklahomans.
High school students have to travel long distances for any sort of sporting event or club meetings.
McVay lists a few of the commitments her students travel for, “FFA, track, baseball, slow pitch softball.”
What they do, they sometimes feel, hardly seems to matter in the big picture.
So the pillowcase assignment proved to be about much more than just getting a letter grade.
“Everyone around here kind of takes care of each other,” says Senior Diego Reynoso.
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Her class manages to make 50 to 100 of them every spring.
They send them ‘downstate’ to Oklahoma City’s Children’s Hospital and a few to Integris Baptist Hospital to brighten faces they’ll never see.
What they can see, Nancy argues, “That we do something good for children who are hurting.”
The connection between them will be there nevertheless, a very long thread helping to bind an Oklahoma standard.
“It makes us feel like we’re doing something,” agrees Parker Fitts.
The Oklahoma Panhandle Chapter of Ryan’s Case for Smiles is one of more than 120 such groups making pillowcases for juvenile hospital patients.
Last year, the organization produced nearly 200,000 pillowcases and delivered them to 362 participating hospitals in the U.S.
For more information on the mission, click here.
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