DALLAS — Regan Palfey, a third-grade teacher at Dallas Elementary, organized a drive to collect over 1 million aluminum can tabs between Feb. 2 and June 30 to raise $400 for the Ronald McDonald House of Danville.
The 1,348,800 tabs weighed 823 pounds and were collected from students at the school and members of the community. Palfey recycled them at Allan Industries in Wilkes-Barre for a total of $288. The rest of the money was donated by Phoenix Scale & Food Equipment.
Palfey said the husband of a school secretary works for the Dallas company.
Community service is always part of Palfey’s curriculum.
“I always have class elections, and the class representatives do acts of kindness,” she explained. This year, her students had a hat-and-glove drive for the St. Vincent de Paul clothing closet, plus a food-and-supply drive for Blue Chip Farm Animal Refuge. Palfey then decided to take it a step further.
“I kind of wanted to personally get the whole school involved in the community as well,” she said.
Ronald McDonald House offers housing to families with children in hospitals far from home so they do not have to travel every day. Palfey said her sister was once very close to needing the organization’s services, and talking to others in the situation made her understand the struggle.
Her late father used to collect tabs, and that inspired her.
Tab collection is a common fundraiser for some Ronald McDonald houses, said the Danville location’s executive director, Michael Turlis. He was invited to Palfey’s classroom to conduct a presentation, and also invited her for a tour of the facility.
“We were so grateful to Regan and her students. They did a wonderful job and we thoroughly enjoyed our time visiting the students. They were very engaged, they asked a lot of good questions, and that is a reflection on Regan,” Turlis said. “She is just a wonderful role model for these students.”
Turlis explained all donations go to the Danville location to help offset operational costs.
“We have the same operational costs that anyone else has. For example, operating a home,” he explained. “However, we are a 19-bedroom facility, so you can look at your own home expenses and imagine a home with 19 bedrooms.”
After she decided her goal was 1 million tabs, Palfey approached the school’s principal, who suggested they motivate students by offering the top three classes an extra recess period on a new football field.
“They were highly motivated by that,” Palfey laughed.
Rather than counting every individual tab, she used a scale to weigh the tabs as they came in. One pound equals 1,600 tabs, she said.
A week before the collection ended, the children had amassed 948,000 tabs, Palfey said, which was just short of the goal. At that point, she reached out to the community by placing a blurb in the Times Leader.
“It was truly amazing how much the community came through and helped us go above and beyond our goal,” Palfey said. “All of a sudden people were showing up to my room with buckets and buckets … and everybody had a story,” she added.
“Somebody had a story that their grandfather passed away and had five containers of them, and they just couldn’t get rid of them. They just had a feeling there was something they needed to do with it. And there it was.”
