Community, Butler Elementary give Copperview students stuffed animals to love

By Julie Slama | j.slama@mycityjournals.com

About500 Copperview Elementary students may have a stuffed animal to cuddle this spring, thanks to the generosity of the community.

“We want every one of our students to have something to cuddle, something to love, a stuffed animal to call their own,” said Lorrie Judd, Copperview PTA secretary. “We’re almost there. We probably have about 400 or 425.”

Judd said the PTA became involved with the stuffed animal drive after learning from the school’s first-grade teacher Pamela Schuller that not all of her students have or have had their own stuffed animal. She said Schuller has been collecting stuffed animals annually to give to first-graders.

“I asked, ‘Why can’t we collect stuffed animals and make sure every child in our school has a stuffed animal of their very own?’ So as a PTA, we voted on it and decided that it was what we wanted to do,” she said. “My kids, my grandkids all have had stuffed animals, but we’re a Title I school and we have a lot of different people from different areas so this is something we just wanted to do for the kids.”

Shortly before the winter school break, Judd posted a request for new or gently used stuffed animals on the Next Door app.

“I was overwhelmed at the response,” she said, adding that the animals are laundered before distribution. “One person who was a college student told me, ‘I’ve never gotten rid of any of my stuffed animals—and it’s time that I did.’ A fire station in Draper brought about 30 new stuffed animals and bears for our students. Another lady whose husband would always play those claw machines and had tons of them, maybe 100; she said he collected them before he passed many years ago and she brought us those.”

One of those who responded was Butler Elementary PTA President Annalisa Spencer.

“I was just on the Next Door app and saw the post that said, ‘Hey, we’re gathering stuffed animals for the students in our school,’” she said. “When I talked to their PTA secretary, she said that most of the students at the school had never owned their own stuffed animals. So, our students did a drive; they made announcements and things and put out some bins in our front office for about a week. We gathered about 200 stuffed animals.”

The Cottonwood Heights elementary school’s student leaders sorted the plush animals by size and ensured all of them were in good condition.

“Some of them were giant ones. There were some really nice stuffed animals that were donated,” Spencer said. “Our community is really generous, and I often get requests from parents for more opportunities that our