Students Offer ‘Extra Hands’ for ALS

By Sarah McClellan-Brandt, Contributing Writer, The Colleyville Courier

Daniel Basco, a senior at Colleyville Heritage High School, has volunteered in nursing homes and retirement centers, but was looking for a different volunteer opportunity when he found an organization that allowed him to use his computer skills to help others.

Basco volunteers with Extra Hands for ALS, a charity that helps people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He helps Brian Welch, a Colleyville man who has the disease, to use a computer program that helps him communicate with people.

“I’m helping him program the software to make it easier to use,” Basco said. “The only things he can move are his head and his eyes and he doesn’t speak, which is where the program comes in.”

Basco, along with other students in the area, gets school credit for volunteering under the Scholar Ambassador program and for the National Honor Society, but he says he volunteers for other reasons.

“It is different and challenging,” he said. “And my great-uncle died of ALS.”

Linda Allen, program manager of the organization’s Dallas-Fort Worth branch, said about 80 students in the Metroplex volunteer. She targets student volunteers because they are the next generation of people who can help garner awareness of the disease.

“They’re going to be the next doctors, lawyers and congressmen,” she said. “By getting them involved at this stage of their lives, we believe they will take the message in a direction that will only benefit the ALS community for years to come.”

Lauren McMahon, also a senior at Colleyville Heritage, was so impressed with the organization after volunteering to help a woman with the disease last year that she persuaded the junior class council to put on the 5K Fun Run for ALS for its outreach program for the spring semester. She and Mariam Khedery, also a senior, helped the woman with chores around her house and kept her company for two to three hours per week.

“Knowing that I was helping someone was awesome,” McMahon said. “To know that us being there had an effect on her and was helping her out — it was just the smallest things that I do at my own house every day. We didn’t know that washing the dishes could help someone out that much.”

Patt Walker, the faculty sponsor for the class council of the Class of 2007, which put on the run last year and plans to do it again this year, said community projects are extremely important to student development.

“‘They live in a bubble over here,” she said. “They’re fortunate, they live in a very affluent area and go to a school highly ranked nationally and sometimes just don’t have exposure to what life is like for someone less fortunate. A disease where the mind is sharp but the body quits is, for a teenager, hard to grasp. Their outpouring of love was awesome to watch.”

Walker said the kids worked countless hours to make the 5K run happen. They designed fliers and distributed them all over the district, contacted the police to help with the route, registered runners and got permission from the city and the administration in addition to the other tactical work that comes with putting on an event of that nature.

But the biggest success, she said, was helping grow the awareness of the disease within the school and the community. More than 300 people showed up to run the March 25th race, which garnered $2,000 in donations for the organization. Allen said the money went to a research fund for the disease.

“It turns out we’re the first high school to put on an event of this caliber for ALS,” she said. “One of the founders of Extra Hands even flew in from New Jersey to participate.”

The date for this year’s event hasn’t been set yet, but Walker said she expects even greater success. When the Class of 2007 graduates at the end of this school year, Walker hopes that the freshman class will take over the race as their own project in the coming years.

“The school helping us put a face on this disease is very important,” Allen said. “And these kids go away with life lessons they may never get otherwise by being involved with a patient and learning about the disease. The students paired with a family come away with compassion and an understanding of people with disabilities.”