CARIBOU, Maine — About 300 students of the Teague Park Elementary School participated in this year’s Jump Rope for Heart event last Friday at the Caribou Wellness Center.
“[It’s] a wonderful event put on here for the past 13 years and it’s a wonderful event stressing exercise for the kids,” Physical education and health teacher Evan Graves said. “We talk about healthy eating, and get education in about being heart healthy.”
For the past 40 years the Jump Rope for Heart initiative, created by the American Heart Association, has encouraged young children to get active and learn about heart health.
“It’s also a community service project where kids raise money that gets donated to the heart association which we give away for research,” State of Maine Youth Market Director for the American Heart Association Gary Urey said.
At the Caribou Wellness Center, students enjoyed heart healthy activities.
“It’s a lot of fun. Kids learn some great tricks,” Urey said. Students jumped with long ropes and short ropes, games of double dutch broke out while at the same time other kids experimented with partner tricks. A member of the Caribou fire and ambulance team, Mike Divito, was on hand to check heart rates and record blood pressure.
Seventy-four-year-old State senator, former school teacher, and jump rope aficionado Peter Edgecomb of Caribou made the trek back to The County to show students a thing or two about jumping.
“It’s my goal to be able to jump 100 times at three times per second,” Edgecomb said before he dazzled the children as he whipped his rope at an amazing speed and made good on his promise to pull off his 100 jumps. “You have to do this a long time and it really gets the heart pumping I can tell you that,” Edgecomb said.
Students were presented with awards for their 2014 efforts, they placed first in the American Heart Association for north of Bangor Division 3, and the Teague Park School brought home the national Heart Healthy School Award. This year students managed to raise almost $8,000 for the American Heart Association.
Classes that won overall top fundraiser were Mrs. Bourgeois’ third-grade class, grade four was Mrs. Theriault’s class, and grade five was Mrs. Levassuer’s.
Students will enjoy pizza parties for the top classroom fundraisers in each grade, the top classroom gets to sign the annual Jump Rope for Heart banner, and top five in each class receives an ice cream sundae.
