Four schools in the county have given back in a big way to help those still affected by lead contamination in post-Hurricane Katrina Louisiana.

They made and gave out Fundred Dollars, which are original, hand-drawn interpretations of U.S. $100 bills. The goal of the Fundred campaign is to collect over three million of these unique artworks.

That cumulative total of 300,000,000 Fundred Dollars supports the equivalent cost (in U.S. Dollars) required to make safe every lead contaminated property in post-Katrina New Orleans, so that every child is protected from the poisonous metal.

Springville Elementary was this areas collection site for the campaign. Art teacher Lara McClendon first heard about Fundred a few years ago from an art conference she attended several years ago.

McClendon, who graduated from LSU, and a teacher from Huntsville got on board the Fundred project soon after finding out about its purpose. “It was still in its infancy at that point,” she said.

She volunteered SES to be a collection site for the state and, at the time, it was the only such site in Alabama. She has been collecting Fundred Dollars for two years from anywhere from Birmingham to Mobile or Auburn and many places in between.

“What caught my attention when I first heard about it was because of the post-Katrina mess that was left behind. I actually had some college buddies here when it hit who are one of the many who lost their house when Katrina hit. As we were watching that on the news and saw the helicopter flyovers with people standing on their roofs, they said, ‘There’s my neighborhood. Oh! There’s the top of my house.’ So, Katrina hit very close to home for me.”

She continued, “While they were trying to get back to Louisiana and trying to get back in touch with families that had been scattered about, our school was collecting clothes and other things they needed. When Katrina first hit we had collected all kinds of stuff at Springville Elementary.”

After the hurricane many were displaced along the Gulf Coast and McClendon said one of her college friends who teaches had their school grow from 300 to 600 students in two weeks.

Again, Springville’s students collected extra school supplies and then packed McClendon’s car full of them and she drove those supplies to the students in need.

With the Fundred campaign, MClendon was able to link the personal stories she knew to her students to let them know that the faux $100 bills would serve a greater purpose outside the artroom.

“When we started collecting the Fundred Dollars, they found out about the lead content in that area,” McClendon said, “One of the high content areas in New Orleans was in the Audubon Zoo. For elementary kids, it hit them hard, because they’re able to see that they could go to a zoo, but they couldn’t play in the dirt at the playground there because of the lead contamination.”

Springville collected $18,000 Fundred Dollars from across the state, including some made by students at St. Clair County High School and Odenville Elementary. Moody Elementary made and sent their artistic Fundred Dollars to the Birmingham Museum, which held a special Fundred collection celebration yesterday. Moody High School art students are  currently working on making Fundred Dollars.

“The coolest thing is that when you have a major disaster, kids see it and they know things are wrong and we talk about helping; but when you’re six or seven years old, you can’t go down there and change it out,” Mcclendon said. “What this gave them is some empowerment as how they can-as a kid-help other kids in a major way and it gave them that ability.”

For more information about the program, visit Fundred.org.