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Bib No. 95 came down the homestretch with a paper cup still in one hand, a purple headband sliding over her brow and a grin that nearly swallowed the morning. Behind her on the blacktop trailed a long, color-coded stream of classmates — yellow, green, pink, blue and red headbands chasing the same chalk arrows around Lucretia and Joseph Brown School in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
The Brown School’s 10th Annual Fun Run drew 450 pre-K through 3rd grade students on Thursday, May 21, the morning before Memorial Day weekend. By the time the parent-teacher organization (PTO) tallied results, the school had logged $31,813 from 662 gifts — about $10,800 past the $21,010 goal set in honor of the event’s 10th year, according to the PTO’s online fundraising page.
Principal Mary Maxfield opened the morning in a tie-dyed shirt, microphone in one hand and clipboard in the other, leading a warm-up beside school mascot Hoppy the Frog. She told students the run had pulled donations from 22 states and countries, with gifts arriving from as close as Canada and as far away as Uruguay. “The love for our school community is WORLD WIDE!” Maxfield said.
Classes ran as color-coded teams. Team Kleemola finished first on the classroom leaderboard with $4,295 raised, followed by Team O’Connor at $2,775 and Team Duffy at $2,095, according to the PTO.
The event has moved with the school. It started a decade ago as a community-building fundraiser at the old Bell School, shifted to the Coffin School during the COVID-19 era to keep students together outdoors and is now in its fifth year at the new Lucretia and Joseph Brown School. Across 10 runs, the PTO says, it has brought in more than $250,000.
Proceeds underwrite programs that sit outside the regular school budget: outdoor garden teaching, visits from children’s book authors, the S.T.E.A.M. Fair, the Book Fair, the Monster Mash and the Holiday Shop. The PTO also funds teacher and staff appreciation. Local sponsors included JCC of the North Shore, Mud Puddle Toys, Pint Size & Up, YMCA of the North Shore and Yoga Loft.
Students who raised $210 or more earned a Hoppy the Frog keychain; those who brought in $110 by May 10 received a 10th-anniversary water bottle and bike sticker. Classrooms that reached full registration or hit their fundraising goal won 10 extra minutes of recess.
Donations were scheduled to close Tuesday evening, capping a 10-year cumulative total above $250,000 — gathered, headband by headband, by a school that started doing this back when its building had a different name.
