When Niles High School student Evan Robison took to the track with 400 other students on Friday for the Vikings Fight Cancer Walk, the senior was decked in pink from his shirt and sunglasses to his fake pink mustache.
The walk was one of the final events in Pink Week, where students raise funds for cancer fighting causes in honor of breast cancer awareness month.
Karissa Young, special education teacher at Niles High School, helps Students Against Destructive Decisions coordinate the annual event. For students, Young said Pink Week always shows them how much they can make a difference in their community.
“This is about bringing the youth together and showing them that they can make a difference,” Young said. “They know the money will go to a good cause.”
With the walk and fundraiser combined, students were able to raise roughly $1,300. On Monday they will vote on a local cancer fighting charity to give the money to. Students also spent the week learning about prevention and honoring those who had fought cancer by writing their names on a ribbon and adding it to a memorial wall.
“A lot of the kids were surprised at the number of people that die each year or the number of people that are going to get invasive breast cancer,” Young said. “We talked about early detection and how that money can help women get mammograms.”
The awareness week and fundraising started in 2008, when Young said two students asked for her help in designing a school-wide activity that would spread awareness and help fight breast cancer.
“We really kind of felt that the community needed help and by using the student’s idea they kind of spurred it on,” Young said of the annual awareness week.
On Friday, students were united in fighting the disease. To walk the track for the Vikings Fight Cancer Walk students wore pink and donated a $1 to walk for an hour.
While some were just excited to get out of class for the last part of the day, many students expressed excitement at being part of the fight against cancer.
Sporting pink football jerseys, seniors Cody Glick, Jake Hamm and Camron Caniff walked together. When asked how it feels to wear all pink, Glick said “good.”
As for Robison, he said he was happy to see students united by a common cause. Like many of the students, he said that he knows friends whose families had battled cancer in the past. But the walk also served as a way to celebrate those who had survived and for this reason, Robinson danced along the track as music played over the speakers.