East Ramapo’s Spring Valley High School Key club has long had very active group of teens. Here are a few of their recent projects:

• Students collected 60 pounds of can tabs as a project to help support Ronald McDonald House Charities of Central New York. At 1,267 tabs per pound, that means the students collected more than 76,000 tabs.

• Students also raised money for “Nurse Tony,” a pediatric recovery nurse on the Mercy Ship in Liberia. This is how club adviser Daryl Marx described it:

“This year, it was by chance that the Spring Valley High School Key Club had the good fortune of coming in contact with pediatric recovery room nurse Tony Amato. Tony volunteered his own time aboard the Mercy Ship in Liberia, Africa, for 6 weeks, from November through the beginning of January.

“Key Club students wrote letters, e-mails and yes, even called him ship to shore two times over the six weeks. Both sides of the conversation were so impressed with the others’ community service that had been performed over the years that (it) became a mutual admiration society.

“After the second call to Tony aboard the Mercy Ship, the Key Club decided to assist in their own way to help some of the people that Tony had been working with in some of the villages in Liberia. They fundraised by selling birthday balloons in school, to raise $1000 in honor of nurse Tony, and sent a check to the Mercy Ship organization in Texas to purchase the equipment necessary to build a clean water system for one lucky village.

“When nurse Tony came to visit one of the Key Club meetings to show the students a slide show of his events in Liberia, he was surprised by the information that we had sent in this donation in his honor.  He is shown here in this photo, giving a talk to the students of Spring Valley High School Key Club, about his experiences while in Liberia. ”