French Creek Community School sure lived up to its motto recently, as evidenced by the impressive level of participation in the recent district-wide Jump Rope for Heart program.
According to Brandon Rockhill, Ballenas Secondary grad and former football standout who is now a student teacher at FCCS “every lunch hour we had the stereo outside with over 40 students doing jump rope, hoola hooping, and other activities that promote healthy hearts.”
FCCS is known as ‘the small school with the big heart’ and this was evident with the high level of student participation in the recent.
FCCS, he points out, has just over 100 students which makes the number of students who took part — nearly half the student population — even more impressive.
“As a school the most important message that we tried to teach was that having fun and being active will strengthen and protect our hearts. We were very excited when we received the results that our students had raised an amazing total of $2,923 for the Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation,” Rockhill surmised proudly, pointing to “all the hard work and awareness about healthy hearts that has been raised by students during the Jump Rope For Heart program.”
In recognition of the students philanthropic skipping, the entire school gathered for a celebration on the Friday afternoon with 60 minutes of fun activity stations including long rope, short rope, ‘Skip-It’, Chinese jump bands and more.
“We want to thank FCCS students and the local community for their enthusiasm and support to raise awareness about the importance of living an active lifestyle and helping others in need.”
In the meantime, FCCS he said will continue down that path thanks to the school’s new principal Brian Nikula who he said “has been an major reason for the focus on physical activity at the school. He has had many other special after-school and lunchtime programs come into the school and we just finished a very successful track meet.”