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Highlands Today

Sebring High Sets Goal To Help Ugandan Students

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By MARC VALERO | Highlands Today

Published: November 9, 2007

SEBRING — Thousands of children in northern Uganda are living anything but a normal life, but Sebring High School students alerted to the dire situation are serious about making a difference.

Spearhead by a group of Freshman Foundation students, the school has partnered with the Schools for Schools program with a goal to raise $10,000 to help the Ugandan children.

Freshman Foundation teachers showed videos about the Ugandan unrest in their classrooms last month, which made an impact on the freshmen.

"The video is what really caught our attention," freshman Suzannah Beiner said Wednesday. "It was really touching – what the kids went through just because they wanted to go to school ... their plight was just so extraordinary that stuff like that could be going on in this day and age."

Beiner, along with fellow freshmen Jason Parsons, Christina Rush and Samantha Mossman, informed the school board Tuesday about the fundraising effort.

The United Nations says the conflict in northern Uganda, which pits government troops against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), has uprooted 1.6 million people and caused one of the world's most neglected humanitarian disasters.

The University of California and Tulane University provided data this year on forced conscription into the LRA, a rebel group accused of kidnapping tens of thousands of women and children to serve as soldiers, servants or sex slaves in northern Uganda.

Schools for Schools is a program of the non-profit group Invisible Children Inc. Currently 793 schools are involved with the program.

If Sebring High reaches the $10,000 goal by Feb. 1, the School for Schools program will send four Sebring High students and a teacher to Washington, D.C., to meet a Ugandan representative.

Beiner said you hear a lot about the conflict in Darfur in western Sudan and other places, but the situation in Uganda is "eye opening and surreal," and not routinely covered by U.S. news outlets.

"Whenever I watch CNN it's basically what's going on in America and what's going on in the Middle East and that's about it," she said. "If they have time to cover anything else – they just cover the next biggest thing."

Sebring High students are pitching in themselves this month for the first fundraising effort, which is called Change for Change.

A change (coin) drive is being held in each homeroom class with the class collecting the most money receiving a doughnut party.

That money will be used for a big winter festival fundraiser on Dec. 13.

"We are trying to raise a lot of money for the Change for Change so we can do more for the winter festival," Beiner said.

"I just want to get a lot of people aware of what's going on in Uganda," she said. "I think it's really important to help other struggling parts of the world because the kids of today in America are going to have to deal with relations with these people in the future. It's important to keep these ties strong and give aid where it is needed."

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