Gateway students provide care packages for cancer patients

Gateway High School Chick-fil-A Leader Academy students recently spent one morning preparing care packages for cancer patients at AHN Cancer Institute Forbes.

The cancer center in Monroeville sees 250 patients each week, and the teens wanted to provide tote bags for every patient.

Each school year, the high school organization completes three impact projects as a way of giving back to the community.

“The students started brainstorming in December for Spring Impact ideas and one of the ideas was to help hospital patients in some way,” said Dawn Nicolazzo, library media specialist and leader academy advisor.

The students came back from Christmas break in January to discover that one of their teachers was on leave with stage 4 lymphoma. Another teacher’s husband was battling blood cancer and, in February, another teacher’s wife passed away from stomach cancer.

“The high school has been hit pretty hard this year, and the students have wanted to give back in some way,” Nicolazzo said. “With the cancer center directly across the street, we contacted them to see if they would be open to us providing cancer care bags for their patients they see during the week.”

Junior Alejandra Fuentes said bags were packed with skin care products such as lotion and lip balm, games and puzzles, booklets with inspirational messages and snacks. The students also made a gift basket to give to the teacher on leave.

To raise funds for the project, leader academy members sold bracelets and cookies.

“We had a major budget to work with,” Fuentes said.

After packing the bags, students also took time to organize Gator Closet and prepare decorations for a luncheon for the doctors, nurses and staff at Forbes.

The students then loaded the bags and decoration and went to Forbes for a tour of the facility, where they provided lunch and distributed bags to the patients.

“The leader academy give us a bigger opportunity than we usually would get, in regards to helping people. We get to see the impact of giving back,” junior Srilahari Sapram said.

Fuentes agreed.

“We get to work behind the scenes to see how it all gets done,” she said.

For past projects, group has collected nonperishable items for the food pantry and backpack program, volunteered at the monthly drive-thru food distribution, bought Christmas presents for a student battling cancer and provided lunch and gifts to local police departments.

“Our group is really diverse with a lot of different strengths to bring to the table,” Sapram said.