Last year, Shelia Nedoma came up with the plan to start a shoebox club for her special needs kids. She and Elizabeth Laffan, the health science teacher, partnered in order to get it up and running.

“I started the Shoebox Club for my Special Needs students last year, by targeting incoming freshman that could benefit from belonging to an organization,” said Nedoma.

Laffan helped Nedoma with the shoebox club by making it a mandatory class project.

“Since her class was so helpful, we formed a club for anyone that would like to join and make a shoebox task for students with special needs,” said Nedoma.

The shoe boxes contain different interactive activities in order to challenge the students in important areas of learning such as spelling and math.

Some of the shoe boxes contain fake money to challenge the students in math and others contain matching games with colors, shapes, and animals.

“The biggest impact you have as a health care professionals is on the people all around you, and I find it very important for my students to experience helping special needs children and giving back to the community,” said Laffan.

Since Laffan created the project the students have made 45 shoe boxes and 180 file folders. The file folders contain the same concepts as the shoe boxes.

As an incentive, Nadoma said that whoever made the best shoebox would get an award. This year Daniel Dyson was the winner, making a shoebox that contained multiple concepts which challenged the students in a more interactive way.

“Whenever I was making the project I focused on making something that I knew I would like but they would enjoy as well. I wanted to challenge them but not make it too difficult,” Dyson, junior.

Daniel was given a certificate of appreciation along with a card signed by the students to thank him for all of his hard work.