Selena Liu

English teacher Danielle Jansen works with senior Noah Huber during SRT. According to Jansen, IB Creativity Activity Service students are working to help raise funds for hurricane disaster relief from Hurricane Harvey.

One hundred thirty two mile per hour winds, nine days of rainfall and $190 billion worth of destruction. This is the impact Hurricane Harvey had on southeast Texas, where the tropical storm hit the hardest. Harvey was a Category 3 storm. A few weeks later, a similar scenario played out when Hurricane Irma made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Florida. But while these natural disasters took place over 1,000 miles away, students at this school are doing their part to help those impacted by Harvey and Irma.

Senior Simrat Oberoi created a fundraiser called Hope for Houston as part of her IB diploma service project. Oberoi, along with other IB students, plan to pair up with an IB school with the goal to raise $10,000 for a family impacted by Harvey. Collection buckets for this donation drive will be placed in SRT rooms during November.

“It’s good to see people step up. We’ve seen people donate so much money and that’s all you can do at this point,” Oberoi said.

English teacher Danielle Jansen is working with the group to plan the fundraising activities.

“I think this project is a good one because of the extensive hurricane damage in a lot of different areas. With Houston being one of the first hit, it could easily fall into the background and not get a lot of the aid that it needs,” Jansen said.

Along with the donation buckets, the group of IB students is working on hosting an intramural basketball game where students can come during SRT and buy t-shirts.

According to senior Michael Anderson, who is also helping to coordinate efforts, the proceeds from the ticket and t-shirt sales will go toward the Harvey fundraiser.

Key Club has also worked to make a difference for the Harvey victims. The club collected diapers for the Texas Diaper Bank, which gives families in need the necessities young children require.

“Right now, a lot of people are out of their homes or they don’t have the resources they normally would, so they’re really looking for donations to help where people are taking shelter,” Kiki Koniaris, Key Club member and senior said.

Key Club has also paired up with a local church to collect cleaning supplies and blankets for the victims of Harvey.

“We hope to have an impact of some sort,” Koniaris said. “Not anything tremendous because we are only one club, but we also hope to raise awareness within our own club members about hurricane relief.”

Faculty are also helping donation efforts. Theresa Ramos, chairperson of the media and communications department, wanted to acknowledge banned book week while also helping with hurricane relief in Texas and Florida. Banned book week goes against the idea of banning certain books in a library from a particular group of people.

“Banning books results in an uninformed citizenry, and the idea that you have the right as a citizen to read what you want…is what the week is all about,” Ramos said.

Ramos put together a contest where 11 staff members raised money to donate to a library in Texas and a library in Florida, where the hurricanes affected the state the most. 

“The staff members were deemed criminals that were stealing books from the library and the point was to put money in their buckets that they had and whichever staff member collected the most money wears the jail costume,” Ramos said.

Ramos is currently working with the Texas Library Association and the Florida Library Association to figure out which school will receive the donation. The staff members have lined up a publisher, Usborne, that will match 50 percent of the total money raised.

“We will probably pick a younger library because Usborne doesn’t have a whole lot for high school students, so we will go with an elementary library,” Ramos said.

This fundraiser is important to the participating staff members because they know how essential access to books is.

“The goal is to help one of these libraries that have been ravaged by these hurricanes. We want to help them get their collection back together and their doors open,” Ramos said.

These organizations at CHS are all working to make a difference in the hurricane recovery effort. They are removed by hundreds of miles from the affected areas, but this doesn’t stop them from contributing. 

“It’s really heartwarming that people want to come out and do something to help. Sometimes we don’t get to actually go and physically help but if we want to help there are still ways we can help,” Ramos said.

Oberoi said, “I think we as a school are doing all that we can and we as a nation should help people and because of the circumstances–the hurricanes were so close together–there was no way that we could’ve prevented the damage anymore than what occurred.”