Dynamic Dates connects kids, adults, raises money for school projects

For one Dynamic Date, sixth grader Reid McAvey brought his friends Frank, Nicholas, Wilder and Colin to play H-O-R-S-E with Shelburne Community School principal Brett Cluff. The hotly contested game lasted over two days, with Colin ultimately coming out on top.

What do making slime, riding bikes, playing basketball and walking to the country store for a creemee have to do with funding grant projects?

At Shelburne Community School, those are among the adventures students can enjoy through the Dynamic Dates fundraiser, which raffles off adventures from teachers and staff to kids at the school. The school then used the proceeds from those raffles to help match grant funds for new supplies and other things.

This year, the school is putting on almost 45 events for 121 students who won raffles, hosted by dozens of staff. Raffle tickets were 50 cents each, or $10 for a full sheet of tickets. Organizers and participants this year raised more than $4,450 to go toward funding projects that teachers and staff will present to the school’s parent-teacher organization.

Organization member and parent Liz Carney ran the fundraise, which has been going on for more than 10 years.

For her, the event is especially important emerging from COVID-19 shutdowns last year, and she sees it as a way to rebuild community within the school.

“I think it’s really important for us to be cultivating joy and joyful time with each other,” she said. “This is definitely an event that taps into that.”

She noted how excited kids get about the event. Some students go all in on one adventure prize; others try their luck with several by buying tickets for as many event categories as they can.

Carney said the fundraiser is about making connections first, money second. The money goes toward things teachers and staff care about, like snowshoes for the athletic department or new books for classrooms, but also benefit students, too.

The parent-teacher organization helps help secure grant funding for the rest of the costs.

The adventures similarly hold dual purposes.

“It’s as much about spending time with these teachers as it is like doing the activity,” Carney said. Fostering relationships between kids and the staff is important, such as having the teacher or staffer who run the event hand deliver cards to the winners, she said.

Strengthening connections between students and staff is exactly why principal Brett Cluff got involved. Cluff is new to Shelburne Community School oversees grades five through eight.

He’s hosting three Dynamic Dates this year: a game of horse on a basketball court and two Twitter takeovers, in which the student winner can post a picture on the school’s account with a friend.

“We don’t often get invited or asked to kind of get our heads out of the sand and just connect with kids in different ways,” Cluff said. “We try to whenever we can, but the business of running a school right now is very challenging. I leapt at the opportunity to connect with some kids that I didn't know in a different way.”

He’s known for playing basketball at recess with everyone, so he decided as one of his raffle offerings to host a game of horse, a game in which participants earn one letter of the word horse for every shot they miss — whoever spells it out first loses.

“Not only are you raising money, but what you’re really doing is building school community,” said Alice Brown, a staff member who runs the school’s branch of the districtwide Connecting Youth mentoring program.

Brown used to chair the parent-teacher group and helped run the fundraiser for many years. When she ran it, they sold tickets for only 25 cents. But she said the biggest change over the years has been how much organizers have been able to fundraise, from $800 in the early years to nearly $4,500 this year.

The events and the simplicity behind them, though, have stayed the same.

Brown is still involved, and she loves to offer her own dynamic dates. This year, she’s hosting a bike-riding trip and a slime-making session.

“Instead of the person acting like a teacher or a parent or whatever, their job is they’re just acting like somebody to do something fun with,” she said. “It’s a really special thing.”

The original story can be found on Shelburne News.