Do you remember seeing those excited students back in October? 

Those are the students of Kara Leonard-Schmidt's Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 class. We first heard from the class in Ogema back in October after they held a "Needs and Wants" drive to help support The Family Place. You can read more from that here.

We thought the donations and our chat would be the end of the story, another good deed done, but that wasn't the case.

"I actually had a colleague show me this application and then my principal came down after an admin meeting. I kind of put it on the back burner when other colleagues suggested it because, you know, it's overwhelming," Kara laughed. "But then I read it again and then the principal suggested it again and it was a Student Citizenship Grant offered by the public schools of Saskatchewan. And so because you guys have basically done my grunt work for me, you created the video and I utilized the video and I used the footage from Discover Weyburn, which was awesome to have, and added some extra things from my students at the beginning, submitted it to the public schools of Saskatchewan and that's kind of where we ended up."

The video (seen below) was a huge success!

 

"So on Friday, we actually were invited to participate in a meeting with the public schools of Saskatchewan, our class. We did it virtually because, of course, logistically to get to Saskatoon was just too much for 10:30 in the morning to try to do that from Ogema. And they presented us with an award and said that our class was a successful candidate and we received a $1,000 grant for our classroom to spend how we choose. So that was super exciting. The kids were cute. They were adorable. It looked like chaos in the background."

Kara's class was one of three Grade 1-8 classes to win the $1,000 grant, the other two were classes in Moosomin and Lloydminster. 

So what are they going to do with the money? 

"They were pretty excited when they heard $1000. One kid is like what, that's $10 each and I'm like, no, we'll do a math lesson on this," she laughed. 

"We sort of brainstormed at that moment in time of what we're gonna plan to do with the money," she added. "But I said, you guys, this is because we did something for other people. Like we went outside of ourselves. We weren't just looking at ourselves and just us here, but we spread this, our abilities, out to everywhere else and we touched other kids' lives and other people's lives. So they're pretty motivated now. We're getting a new playground, fundraising for a new playground, and so some kids think we should donate money to that. We're getting a new pool in our community. Right now they're focused on super local, which I think is cool. And then even another suggested like a garbage can for downtown. And I'm like, well, that's really smart because there's nowhere to put garbage downtown. We could probably afford that definitely. So it's kind of neat. So they're thinking that a little bit more, you know, and it's nice that to see them and they're like, what are we gonna do next? They have thought about that. So that's kind of nice to see that that's the way their brains are thinking."

We get a feeling that this story isn't about to end here. Congrats to Kara and her class, we can't wait to see what they do next!