Drawing the curtains

There is nothing in my life that I am prouder of than my involvement in Pasta for Pennies.

And I'm about to start my first school year without a fundraising campaign on the horizon because I've quit.

I've been - with Calen - in charge of Princeton High School's Pasta for Pennies fundraising campaign for nearly a decade now, but it's time to step away. Both Calen and I had been involved in the campaign before that as classroom teachers and seen how much good could be done with an enthusiastic classroom teacher and a few involved student leaders. In 2004 our friend Amy Goohs-Hardman told us that should would be leaving at the end of the school year to start a family, and neither of us wanted to Pennies campaign to leave with her, so we asked her if she would run a campaign with us to show us the ropes so we could lead the campaign by ourselves the next year. That triumvirate year we lead the school to a new high of $40,015.65. In the eight campaigns since then - the eight that Calen and I have lead as a pair - we lead the school to raise over a quarter of a million dollars ($266,793.60, to be exact) for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society...

• 2000 (winter/spring) - $7000 - Goohs
• 2001 (winter/spring) - $12,790 - Goohs
• 2002 (winter/spring) - $21,532.30 - Goohs
• 2003 (winter/spring) - $31,962 - Goohs
• 2004 (winter/spring)- $40,015.65 - Calen, Goohs, & ChemGuy
• 2005 (winter/spring) - $35,017 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2006 (winter/spring) - $39,115.67 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2007 (winter/spring) - $39,094.50 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2008 (winter/spring) - $46,161.77 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2009 (winter/spring) - $38,378.55 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2010 (winter/spring) - $30,560.06 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2011 (fall) - $20,861.91 - Calen & ChemGuy
• 2012 (fall) - $17,604.12 - Calen & ChemGuy

That's a phenomenal amount of money, but the money wasn't ever the goal or the thing about which we were most proud.

The goal was always to save lives, and the part that we were - and are - most proud of was watching our students pour their hearts into helping save those lives with us.

We got to become friends with phenomenal groups after phenomenal groups of students who stunned us again and again with their generosity, who set schoolwork on the back burner so they could bake cookies for a basketball bake sale, who walked the stands at the football games selling raffle tickets, who knocked on car windows in Newport, who shoveled snow instead of sleeping in on snow days, and who never failed to amaze us with their generosity.

Some of my favorite memories...

• Matt, Michael, Andrew, and Brian closing their third Rock 4A Cause event - an event that they founded
• Kevin returning from Kroger with twice as many cakes as we had been promised and just shrugging his shoulders, saying that he'd sweet-talked the bakery lady
• Kedrin reporting back that the dog I'd promised him was on invisible fence had walked right through where I'd said the wire was
• Andrew organizing students from a half dozen other schools to maximize the fundraising potential at every stoplight in front of the then new Newport on the Levy
• Desmond shining like a star on Fox19, being more articulate and heartfelt than I could ever have dreamed
• Kevin/Gus wearing an orange costume to poke a little fun at our 'rivals', Orange High School
• Sam, Katy, Matt, Joey, and a very young Alex putting on the News Team leisure suits for a brilliant Anchorman-style campaign video
• Allie and Becky being so shocked when I cursed in jest with them as we served beer at the BrewHaHa
• Sam trying not to laugh when I dropped the F-bomb on him at a particularly tense moment before - I think - our first 5K
• David and Kim grilling like seasoned vets their respective first nights at bd's
• Calen and me presenting at four different national School and Youth training conferences: Phoenix, Miami, Irving, and New Orleans - and being treated like rock stars each time
• Grace, Kate, and Joey doing absolutely everything that we could ever have asked of them and doing it all with such maturity and skill
• Gene crossing the finish line at our first 5K and every year since
• Emma and Amit making us so proud down on the field at Great American Ballpark
• Ray spending a morning in a bear suit and riding crosslegged on a cart during his last spring with us
• A succession of Direnzi's saving our butts with awesome DJ work
• Brynn and Emma and Olivia and the rest of the marathon crew screaming their lungs hoarse on the Air Force base

I could continue this list for a hundred more lines and still miss mentioning dozens and dozens of students who Calen and I couldn't have possibly run the campaigns without - Kyle, Emily, Kristen and Mike and Rachel, Chris and Heather, Jackie and Leah, Presney, Robert, Hannah, Sam, Ellen and Emma and Alyssa, Graham, Clay, Craig, Katy, Nate, Chris, Adrian, Rohan, Kylie, Geo, Julie, Christian, - so many more.

And we were always the most proud when we'd heard that there was a new Pasta for Pennies collection at Eastern Kentucky or Morehead or even throughout the residence halls of Syracuse - either with the money coming back through our campaign our through their own...or when we heard that one of our former helpers had found their way to non-profit management a university.

We knew all along that we were making a difference, but we knew it most directly when we stopped by Sharon Woods for a farewell party for one of our patient heroes that the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society had helped and who was by then healthy enough to head home to Michigan, no longer needing to live his life near Cincinnati's Children's Hospital. Two years earlier, Nathan's mother had told Princeton students that Nathan probably wouldn't last through the summer, that they were taking him out of school to visit Disneyworld while he could still enjoy it. I'm not foolish or lacking hubris enough to say that it was our money that helped save Nathan's life, but I would like to think that our stone thrown into the fundraising pond had a few ripples maybe in the right direction - either through the money we directly raised or through the efforts of our students out in the world.

It's time, however, for Calen and me to step off the stage. We're hopeful that the campaign might come back to Princeton sometime, but it likely won't be under our leadership. It's time for some new blood - either to run the Pennies campaign or to start some other charitable endeavor at Princeton.

We won't be giving up the Society entirely, however, as we'll still be holding our 5K on the first Saturday in March and will each be volunteering with the Society throughout the year - stuffing envelopes, serving at Taste of the World, maybe visiting Light the Night. Saving lives through the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society something I certainly still believe in; I just need to find a little different way to do good.

I'm going to go flip through a few of the thousands of photos I have of the campaign and let the tears flow at this point, folks...feel free to join me after the jump...

Whither Henryville?

I don't know what to say about the destruction in Henryville, IN.

I knew a teacher at Henryville High School a couple of decades ago and grew up not twenty miles from the High School that no longer exists.

I know I wondered why Princeton cancelled all evening activities this past Friday night, but I stopped wondering after I heard the stories on Saturday morning. Moscow, OH...Henryville, IN...and lots of other cities saw destruction that I hope never to experience but know that I'm lucky to have never seen. Thirty nine people died in one of the largest early-season tornadic outbreaks in recorded history.

I wish the families and folks well.

I can happily say that my folks lost nothing more serious than an awning, but I'll be sending my donation to help out. Give if you've got a couple of bucks.

I know those folks...

'Caught this on tv yesterday morning and was pleasantly surprised to see the two young actors at the very end (the two who come out after 0:23).  I was surprised because I've taught those two.

They're awesome young people, and it doesn't hurt that they're acting in a commercial for a good cause.

Federer is funny...

Thanks to ESPN for pointing out the existence of this video...

Update: They filled the truck

Major congrats to Dan Regenold and the FrameUSA folks for successfully filling the truck.  Don't know if any of you helped out - if so, major thanks.

Check out some photos of the FrameUSA folks (many of whom I am happy to know) filling the truck over on their Flickr stream.

Wackadoos...

Help a Regenold out

I've mentioned FrameUSA before as they're the biggest sponsor that we've had for the past few years of our Pasta for Pennies campaign, and I want to give the FrameUSA folks - especially Dan Regenold - a major shout out today.

Every month, FrameUSA donates $1 from every website purchase to a charity of the month.  I know that in the Pasta for Pennies months, FrameUSA has made donations between $800 and $1100 each of those months.  Assuming that those are typical months, that means FrameUSA is donating well over $10,000 to charities throughout the year.  I'll admit that I haven't the foggiest idea what a year's revenue for FrameUSA is and whether that's 1% or what of their revenue, but I'm still amazed at the charitable giving that they engage in.  Not only do they do this charitable work, but they do this work publicly, encouraging others to come along with them and to turn their donation into a much larger donation for the charities that they choose to support.

This month's charity is a new one for FrameUSA: The Healing Center.  It's a part of the Vineyard Church in Cincinnati, and "[t]he Healing Center offers practical, social, and spiritual support to individuals and families. Services include, but are not limited to: food and clothing, job skills training and job search assistance, auto repair (Saturdays only), mentoring, financial counseling, tutoring, prayer, life skills training, and helpful information about local community services."  FrameUSA is doing their typical $1 per order donation, but they're also moving to a much higher level with something they're calling FillTheTruck.org in which they're trying to, well, fill a truck with needed items for the Healing Center - blankets, sheets, coats, gloves, toilet paper, diapers, socks, canned food, and other items.

To get things started, FrameUSA sent out a bunch of $20 gift certificates for FillTheTruck.org.  The gift certificates are meant to get people to the site and add their donation to the $20 donation (I'm about to put in my donation and use theirs, too) and it means that FrameUSA is donating way more than they already are.

If you get a chance, head over the FillTheTruck.org website and make your own donation.  Or, if you're in the Cincy area, feel free to stop by the FrameUSA outlet to drop off donations of the needed supplies in person.

And feel free to drop a mention of thanks to Dan Regenold, owner of FrameUSA, for being a pretty amazing guy.

Drop a dollar or two...

Every week or two, I head to the Cincinnati Enquirer's website and search for any stories about Princeton.

This past weekend, a nice one came up.

It's about John Viall, a resident of Glendale, OH and parent of a couple of PHS grads.  He's painting the Harry Whiting House in Glendale as a fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund.

It's not Viall's first fundraiser for the JDRF.  A few years back, he biked across the country and raised over $13,500 for the JDRF in the process.  Check out his blog about that event.

I know one of his daughters better, but I've met John Viall a few times, and I can say that I'm pretty impressed with the guy's dedication to a cause.

Drop him a few bucks if you get a chance, either through 5/3 Bank which has an account set up for his fundraiser or directly to the man...

John J. Viall
750 Woodbine Avenue
Glendale, Ohio 45246

Checks should be made out to the JDRF.

update: the cause is now corrected...thanks to Matt W for catching my error

How awesome is this?

Last spring, folks from the national Leukemia & Lymphoma Society came to PHS to film for this year's national campaign videos.  My room got emptied of students and turned into a make-shift studio for the day.

I just looked through the blog archives and am more than a little surprised that I didn't mention all this in the blog back when it was happening.

But, that's not the point.

Today is the first day of our new fall campaign for Pasta for Pennies.  Due to concerns by out principal that our campaign was distracting the school from standardized test preparations, we moved to October and are running things from October 4 through October 29.

That's not the point, either.

The point is that the LLS's national videos are posted, and our folks - me, Calen, and our students - are all over the videos...









How frickin' cool is that?

For the newbies...

Every year I get a few new readers as I point my students to my class website - which now has a non-hidden link to this blog - and thought I'd take a moment to point out a couple of things that might be helpful to them.

There's the PHS wikipedia page that I originally created and wrote but that has since been heavily - and occasionally vulgarly - edited.

There's the Picasa Web account where I now post all of my school photos.  No personal photos there, just stuff that happens related to PHS.  At the moment, it goes back to pictures of basketball in the 08-09 school year, but I have two more years worth of photos to upload.  They'll be up there as this year goes onward.

Just this past week I created a PHS Pasta for Pennies facebook page where we (Calen and I) will be posting events and campaign updates.  This won't replace the campaign's main website, but it'll be an easy way for the facebook crüe to keep track of the campaign.  For example, we already have four incentives listed up there and will hopefully be adding more this week.

If you're curious about the title of the blog, feel free to go back and see the origin of the phrase as well as the series of columns that grew out of it.

If you're actually looking to learn something about me, feel free to click on the narcissism tag over in the cloud. 

I tend to use nicknames around here, mostly because I'm not sure that everyone wants to have their real names spread far and wide on the intertubes.  You can check an old list of who those nicknames are in this post.

Now I have a favor to ask of the non-newbies around here.  What posts would you recommend for the newbies to check out?  It can be a post that says something important about me, a post that links to something fun, a post that sums up the pointlessness of this blog...whatever.

"Princeton grad chases Olympics, fights hunger"

G-Movement: Chris Smith from Action Against Hunger USA on Vimeo.


Every week or so, I check the Cincy Enquirer's website ad search for any Princeton-related articles.  This week I got lucky and found an article headlined "Princeton Grad Chases Olympics, Fights Hunger" about a Sharonville man who must've graduated from PHS just a year or two before I arrived there, Chris Smith.



Smith was a wrestler and pole vaulter at PHS who then headed on to UC where he has since earned his masters and come within three inches of qualifying for the US Olympic team in 2008.  Now, however, he's working on qualifying for the Jamaican team as his Dad was Jamaican and would set a Jamaican national record if he reaches his personal best of 5.50 meters (~18 feet).



He's also fundraising for Action Against Hunger and is one of five athletes sponsored through Gatorade's G Movement program.

Feel free to check his blog and chuck in a buck or two if you have extra lying around.

Yard sale for a good cause

This Saturday, WGRR (one of the Cincy oldies stations) is holding a yard sale with all proceeds going to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.  Check out all the details and head over to Bechtold Park from 9am-1pm on Saturday to make a donation and maybe get something you need.

Bringing it back

The snow has fallen - bringing us our fourth snow day of the year at PHS and our snowiest February ever in the Cincinnati area - and the world is fairly well blanketed by the two feet of snow that have fallen in the past week and a half.  It's a mess out there, folks.

And still, Children's Hospital in Cincinnati is, I'm sure, open and treating patients who can't take a day off from their chemotherapy, from their radiation, from their fight to live another few days or weeks or - if they dare to dream - years. 

I get to spend another day on the couch, working through Super Mario Brothers Wii, doing another load of laundry or two, watching the dogs romp through the backyard, and playing on the internet because mother nature has been kind enough to grace me with her snowy form of hooky.

Other families get to call the cab company and hope for a ride to the hospital.  They get to wake up after spending another in an endless string of nights in the intensive care unit, holding their child's hand in hopes that they will get to eventually take that child home.  They live out of suitcases, take short trips to their house, and come back day after day no matter the conditions of the roads.  Driveways go unshoveled because they have to be back at the hospital if their child is to have any hope to fight the disease that mother nature has been unkind enough to grace them with.

If they're lucky - if their child fights the odds and gets to head home - then they get to spend another few years fighting for the educational assistance that their child is likely to need for the rest of their school career as the life-sustaining chemotherapy often causes damage to developing brains leaving their daughter, their son with learning disabilities and challenges that no one - much less a child who has fought for their life - should have to suffer.

Those children might grow up to be sterile, might have stunted growth patterns, might never have the same opportunities to thrive and survive that you and I will likely have because of the harshness of the treatments that they had to undergo as developing young people.

But still, every day the chances that those children will survive long enough to deal with those added challenges goes up.  The rise in survival rates is incremental when looked at over small scales, but are staggering when viewed over the sixty year history since the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has been working:

• From 1960 to 1963, the five-year relative survival rate among Americans of European descent with leukemia was 14 percent.  From 1975 to 1977, the five-year relative survival rate for all persons with leukemia jumped to 35 percent, and from 1999 to 2005 the overall relative survival rate was 54 percent. The relative survival rates differ by the person's age at diagnosis, gender, race and the type of leukemia. (source)
• The five-year relative survival rate for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma has increased dramatically from 40 percent in whites from 1960 to 1963 to more than 86 percent for all races from 1999 to 2005.  Five-year relative survival rates are 91.8 percent for all patients who were less than 45 years old at diagnosis.  (source)
• The five-year relative survival has increased from 12 percent in 1960 to 1963 for whites to 37.1 percent from 1999 to 2005 for all races and ethnicities.  The three-year survival rate as of January 2006 was nearly 56 percent.  (source)

The simple truth is that people are fighting to live, and because of the work that the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is doing, people are winning that fight more and more often than they ever have before.

And some small part of the fight is being won because of Princeton High School's Pasta for Pennies Campaign.

Over the decade in which PHS has been involved in the campaign, we have raised of $325,000 to fund research into, subsidize patient services for, and educate young people about blood cancers.

I have spent enough time on this blog explaining why this campaign matter to me, why I own a copy of A Lion in the House, why I hate the Girl Scouts, that I would hope every one of you understands what this charity means to me, so I won't belabor the point further.

I have said it before, and I will close with exactly the same words that I closed with a year ago...

If you can, please take a moment and make a donation to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. You can donate via our campaign by going to this website and choosing the [Click Here to Contribute button].

You can also send us a check at the following address...

Lonnie Dusch
Princeton High School
11080 Chester Rd
Cincinnati, OH 45246

If you're a little cash poor right now, then give the Society your time. Collect on your dorm floor...ask your neighbors for donations...contact your local LLS chapter and see what you can do to help out...sign yourself and your friends - or sports team - up for our 5K...find a school in your area that participates in the Pasta for Pennies or Pennies for Patients program and make a donation through them...

Just give something.

It's too important not to.

XO 3

Holy crap, the new One Child Laptop concept looks awesome.

The brief description - "As announced in Tuesday’s  press release, after our upcoming releases of our 1.5 and 1.75 models next year, we are looking at the XO-3, a thin touchscreen tablet." - sounds like it won't be out until late 2010, at least.

But I'll certainly be paying attention to when the new one is available.  'Cause it looks awesome.

Don't lie down on this fundraiser...

It may seem an odd fundraiser, but that's only because it is.

But, anybody need a mattress?

Christmas giving

The Girl and I have chosen to go the charity route each of the last two Christmases (sp?), giving a laptop to the One Laptop Per Child movement a couple of years ago and giving a DS and some games to the Childs Play Charity last year.

We're looking for a worthy charity this year - something that would end up as a fairly anonymous gift, and I'm currently leaning toward Donors Choose.

Anybody have any other suggestions for this year?

Update: SocialVibe & a cleaner sidebar

SocialVibe is gone from the sidebar, folks.

I figured it was worth a try, but the count sat at 747 patients helped (which was a number I couldn't actually figure out anyway) for like three weeks, I'm good with the fact the app wasn't something that interested you folks, so I'm chucking it to the curb.

Feel free to support the LLS directly (or by shopping at The Gap or Old Navy) if you're interested.

I'll be making my annual pitch sometime in early February.

One Step at a Time

A few years back, The Girl thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, setting out from Springer Mountain, GA in March of 2002 and stepping foot atop Mt Kathadin a few days before Labor Day that same summer.  In five and a half months - five months of hiking, two weeks of resting along the trail - she walked the 2100+ miles of the Appalachian Trail.

Well, almost all of them.

She did get horrible blisters and systemic poison ivy - which got nasty enough to turn into cellulitis - after her first week out and had to lay off a week then grab a ride to catch up to her group, so she technically has about eighty miles still to hike, but who's quibbling?

She speaks of the journey as one of the happiest times of her life, a time when she had no responsibilities other than to put one foot in front of the other and make sure she made it to her self-assigned checkpoint each night.

She wasn't totally alone on the Trail at all times, though.  The AT creates an informal community of hikers each summer, a community that communicates with itself via hiking log books and messages passed by way of hikers along the trail.  Initially, she set out with a group of three other women, none of whom she had ever met in person before the hike and three of whom actually finished the journey - though only two of them did so at the same pace.  Each night, she was expected by her hiking companions, and had she not shown up, they would have hunted her down - or at least I hope they would have.

I mention all of this because I read a story in the Hamilton Journal News - the local paper - about Jerrod Bley who thru-hiked the AT this past summer, summitting Kathadin a scant four days before they close the Trail's northern terminus for the winter season.  Along the way, he tried to fundraise in honor of his father who passed away from heart disease after suffering from kidney diseases all his life.

He and his hiking companion - who wasn't as successful in his trek - set up a website to track their progress and to which they planned to blog each week or so.  They weren't as successful in the blogging bit, but they're close to being totally successful in their fundraising, so I'm going to drop a few bucks their way.

If you have a chance and a few spares in your pocket, do the same.

Take a look...

I'm proud of the charity work that I - that we - do at Princeton High School.

We raise $30,000+ every year.  This past weekend we helped the LLS by handing out water at a local marathon.  We've been involved with MyLion.  We help out at Taste of the World.

We do good work.

But if we change the world this way, it will be as one of a few hundred thousand drops of water that eventually cause the glass to spill over.  We aren't changing the game.  We aren't creating entirely new ways for the world to be a better place.

Josh Silver is changing the game.



Holy crap is he changing the game.

If you can, help him raise a few bucks to change the game for the people around the world who need his help.

Whoring out this blog

So, the time has come when I have to take down the Ad-Free Blog icon down in the bottom right.

I have succumbed to the man, to the greater corporate machine and turned this blog into a money-making venture.

Admittedly, it's because Blogger Buzz announced a new gadget teamed with SocialVibe. The new gadget - which has been up since Thursday morning - allows you to click through, rate a clip or do some other thing that engages you with the advertisers (my first click through made me choose which Melrose Place character I am - I didn't have to watch the clips, just picked one). Once that engagement is made, the advertisers make a small donation - and I'm not really sure how much they're making, need to check on that - to the charity of my choosing.

I, of course, chose the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and I'd ask you to take a minute from time to time and click through on the gadget. It's a minute or so out of your time, but any donation can do an amazing amount of good through the Society.

Help the economy and the LLS this weekend

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is having a fund raiser this weekend. By printing this coupon, you can save 30% at any Gap, Old Navy, or Banana Republic store in the US or Canada and have 5% of your check automatically donated to the LLS.

So, do your American duty and get out to help fight the recession monster, folks.