The school hosted a color run for the Challenge 2 Change foundation to fundraise for children in foster care and the school on January 31.

“A color run is a concept that we came about four years ago and it’s something that we really have a fun time with. I think that’s a way to tie in sports, a healthy activity to do something like the color run that’s very unique and you don’t get to do every day, but the kids really liked it,” C2C Epic Youth volunteer Oronde Taliaferro explained.

A color run, as the name suggests, is an event where you get to run a short marathon and colored powder is thrown at you as you run for the sake of fun and fundraising. There are also little mini activities that are organized first. Before the Color Run this year, C2C foundation set up six mini sport activities, which included parkour, soccer, flag football, reaction timing, and basketball.

“Those seem to be the most popular ones with kids. It’s also the sports we can accommodate with most fields. We can go about ten to twelve stations and depending on the size of the field, we cut it down and keep the most popular ones going,” C2C volunteer and employee Ben Astorga explained.

While the school has done a color run at the school before, it has been a long time since they had one, and this is the first time they have done one for a fundraising company like Challenge 2 Change.

“Ever since COVID, I feel like we haven’t got to do the normal, every year activities that the kids get excited for, so I was really happy that we finally got to do something for charity and something that everyone can get excited for since they haven’t had a lot of opportunities to do events like this,” language arts teacher Lanie Snyder said.

The Color Run ended up being attended by mostly middle school students, with four high school students participating in the event. Some of the middle school students who attended the event were sponsored by Snyder, who raised $340 and was able to sponsor seven students.

“I sponsored those students because I knew most of them were trying to raise the money, so some of them either weren’t able to get enough money raised and some of them I knew would have a really good time at the run,” Snyder said. “So, I wanted to make sure they were able to participate in the activities since I knew they would like that sort of thing, so I wanted them to go outside and have fun.”

The two students who fundraised the most for the color run were kindergarten student Harry Bertolino from the lower campus and sixth grade student Kyla Cowan from the upper campus.

“I think it was a huge success. I feel like the kids had a lot of fun; we did some really cool activities which occurs to introduce some games that they may not know about, and at the same time, fundraising efforts the school committee asked for,” Taliaferro said.