Bethel Park students collect bottle caps to help teen who requires dialysis
The third-grade students in Tracy Smith’s room at Memorial Elementary School in the Bethel Park School District have been diligently collecting plastic bottle caps all year to benefit a Pittsburgh area teen who requires dialysis.
For every bottle cap collected, the teen will receive one free minute of dialysis. News that the students were collecting the bottle caps quickly spread and the collection became a school-wide event, with other Memorial classrooms also collecting the bottle caps. Students set up collection spaces at their churches and dance studios, and parents also collected bottle caps at their work places.
To date, the students have collected 15,000 bottle caps. The students counted out every one of the caps, working together to count in groups of 10, then 100, then bagging the caps in groups of 1,000. They also used their math skills to determine that 15,000 bottle caps would generate 250 hours of dialysis. Smith has already delivered 4,000 bottle caps to the teen’s family for dialysis credit.