A Zionsville Community School tradition to get kids active
By James Feichtner
This September will mark the fifth anniversary of Zionsville elementary schools’ Jog A Thon fundraiser. This Parent Teacher Organization event is Sept. 17 during normal school hours.
The event was originally proposed to Eagle Elementary by former California resident and Eagle parent Martine Ouellette; since then the event has taken off, which more and more students getting excited to participate.
Starting at Eagle Elementary, it now continues its tradition at five total Zionsville elementary schools.
The fundraiser is one day when each of the five schools allow all of their students 60 minutes of jog time at each respective facility.
Event chairwoman Natalie Kruger attributes the fundraiser’s success to the healthy initiative of the event, as well as the beneficial funds raised for the schools.
“It’s a healthy event. It’s an active event. It gets the kids going and getting them outside. And the monies that are actually raised are used incredibly efficiently for enhancing their educational experience. Our PTOs, and Zionsville’s community school system in general, are so involved with ensuring that the kids get exemplary services. There’s nothing frivolous about it. Every penny spent is used to enhance the educational experience for the students of the school,” she said.
The event is broken up into grade groups, such as kindergarteners through second graders. While the event is mainly intended for students, teachers and staff are also allowed to participate.
“At eagle, one of the fun things for our kids is our principal Christine Squier is the ‘pace car.’ She starts the first lap for each run and the kids absolutely love that,” Kruger said.
Parents are allowed to join, but do not participate in any jogging. Instead they monitor the children’s progress.
“The parents, while they’re not running or jogging, are actually tracking the laps of the kids by marking their T-shirts every time they go around the track. That way the kids know at the end a pretty good accurate count of how many laps they ran that day,” Kruger said.
While student progress is kept track of, the event it not meant to be a competition. The goal of the jog is for the students to have a fun and healthy activity to participate in.
“It’s definitely more of a personal motivation. We definitely try not to make it competitive in terms of number of laps. But there is an element of competition that we do on a group level. We do a class cheer, so every classroom creates a cheer at Eagle elementary and they compete on their class cheer,” Kruger said.
Safety plays an important role in the fundraiser. While parents and staff are permitted at the event, measures are taken to ensure the students are safe and secure.
“Child safety is absolutely first. Even every parent who is on the premises has to have a full background check. It just comes down to a safety issue of making sure that we have full knowledge of every adult who is on the grounds with the children,” Kruger said.
The PTO has played an important role in helping the event prosper, but a lot of the support comes from the local community and event sponsors.
“We have an unbelievably supportive community. The community is so behind our kids in our school system. It’s absolutely remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it in any other community. It’s really impressive and heartwarming how much the community likes to participate in a fundraiser for our elementary school kids. It’s really neat,” Kruger said.
With the event being so efficacious, Kruger believes the Jog A Thon will continue to prosper in the coming years.
“I definitely think it’ll continue to be a tradition for our schools. I think it will get more complicated, yet more fun the more we grow. We’re very lucky to be a part of a community that is growing in such a positive manner,” she said.
