One Quarter and One Dollar at a Time: Sage Elementary's Third Graders Raise $2,804.42 for RMRA
An event recap from Scott Henley, RMRA’s Executive Director
I walked into the Sage Elementary gym expecting one table of kid crafts. Maybe two. There were twenty. Twenty tables, each one run by a crew of third graders hawking stuff they'd made themselves, and the noise in that gym was something else — the good kind of deafening, the kind that comes from a couple hundred kids being genuinely excited about something. I think our ears were still ringing when we left.
The variety of what these kids came up with made everyone smile. Homemade slime. Cork boards. Bookmarks. One table had built an entire tabletop football game out of a folded paper triangle and a goalpost made from popsicle sticks. A few booths even had little "Barbie"-style toy cash registers to ring people up. And here's the thing — none of it came from a teacher's Pinterest board. The products, the prices, the hand-drawn signs on every booth, all of it was the kids' own ideas.
Every grade from kindergarten through sixth came through to shop, one grade at a time, with the third graders — the ones actually running the booths — going last. Before they were let loose to buy, their teacher had to remind them, out loud, to use their own money and not the donations they'd collected. Judging by a few faces, that had not occurred to everyone.
Honestly, watching these kids work was the best part. One little guy told me, dead serious, "They're 25 cents each, or I've got a special deal — five for a dollar." I only wanted one, but gave him the dollar anyway and told him to keep it. Another kid showed up in a full suit and tie, like he was closing a merger, not selling bookmarks. They were counting change back to people, a skill I didn't realize was becoming a lost art until he watched a third grader do it better than some adults I know. Negotiating, making deals, figuring out what sells. It was a real, hands-on lesson in running a small business, and somewhere in there, the point of the whole thing landed: this wasn't about what they got to keep. It was about what they got to give.
You could see that shift happen over the course of the morning — from "wait, we don't get to keep any of it?" to real pride in handing it over. That's not a small thing to teach a gym full of eight and nine-year-olds, and this school and its teachers deserve every bit of praise for pulling it off. It genuinely restored some of my faith in the future.
None of this happened by accident, either. Lauren McLaughlin, a third-grade teacher at Sage spent time teaching her class about Rett Syndrome and chose it as the cause her students would raise money for. We worked with Lauren throughout to help her kids understand what Rett Syndrome actually is and how their work would help, including support for the Rett Clinic at Children's Hospital Colorado. It meant even more to our team because RMRA's president, Jim Schroath, and his wife Lori have daughters at Sage — this one hit close to home.
We got the final number a little while after the sale, and it did not disappoint: these kids raised $2,804.42. One quarter and one dollar at a time.
On May 27, we headed back to Sage Elementary's library to celebrate with Lauren's class, thank the teachers, and formally accept the donation in person. Ninety students got recognized that day for their work, and it was every bit the inspiring moment we hoped it would be.
That money goes straight to RMRA, where it helps fund Rett Syndrome research and supports the Rett Clinic at Children's Hospital Colorado. Every dollar of it started as a kid's idea at a card table in a school gym.
Much praise to Lauren McLaughlin and everyone at Sage Elementary who had a hand in this. If you ever need a reason to believe things are going to be okay, go spend a morning with ninety third graders running their own businesses for charity. It'll do the trick.
Scott Henley,
RMRA’s Executive Director
