Care to Connecticut

When most kids in Superior were home, starting their holiday vacations, the sixth and seventh grade girl’s traveling basketball teams were surrounding a few tables in the Superior Middle School cafetorium late Friday afternoon.

Scissors in hand, the girls busied themselves turning coffee filters into lacy snowflakes.

Their goal is to help turn the middle school where students of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., are expected to start class in January into a winter wonderland.

“I think they’ll appreciate knowing people are thinking about them,” Alexis Jensen, a member of the seventh grade traveling team said of the elementary school children who survived a mass shooting at their school Dec. 14.

And the students in Superior aren’t alone.

The effort earned a mention on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show on Friday night when actor Elle Fanning mentioned the snowflake project taking place at her high school.

School Board member and mother of two of the members of the traveling teams, Christina Kintop, said she learned about the project when a friend in New York posted something about it on Facebook. It was a message that originated from the Sandy Hook PTA, guiding people in ways they could help.

That prompted her to organize the snowflake making frenzy at the middle school Friday afternoon.

“They wanted something visual and beautiful to show their still safety and beauty in schools,” Kintop said.

While some students folded coffee filters and snipped at the paper’s edges, others used glitter glue to add sparkle to the blizzard of snowflakes.

And they had help from younger students at the school with their mothers.

Second grader Lily O’Neill painstakingly applied red and gold to a white flake, working alone, to make the former middle school Connecticut welcoming for Sandy Hook students.

“We were at a tournament with the sixth grade team when this happened, and it was just kind of hard to be happy,” Kintop said. “It’s a way the kids can do something and give something back, and what a fun idea because no matter how old you are, it’s fun to cut up snowflakes.”

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