AT LAST, SCHOOL GETS 1 MILLION ALUMINUM TABS

BENTON -- How many is a million?

A lot, say students at St. Denis Catholic School in Benton. For six years the students have been collecting aluminum can tabs, hoping to amass a million.

This month they met their goal and Wednesday celebrated with one million can tabs heaped on the gym floor.

Marge King, fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at the school, started the project in 1987.

"It was really a `I-wonder-what' in math," King recalled. "One of our first units at that time was large numbers. We were writing the zeros for a thousand and a million when one of the students wondered what would a million look like. We meditated on it for two days and decided to collect a million of something."

King couldn't recall how the class settled on soda tabs but remembered a discussion about collecting a million pennies. "We thought people might not want to give up a million pennies."

Tommy Arteme, now a junior at Kelly High School in Benton, was among students in that curious sixth-grade class.

"We decided we should collect something to see what a million looked like," Arteme said. "We were so young. We figured we could collect a million tabs that year."

They were wrong, so students passed the collection on from one class to the next. Students from each of the classes who participated in the project attended Wednesday's celebration.

Shana Burton, now a sophomore, said, "We counted the tabs first by tens, then by hundreds and then by thousands."

Surveying the pile on the gym floor, Burton said, "I really thought it would be bigger. But these tabs are small."

After three years, King said, the project lost momentum. "We had 500,000, and I told the students at that time I thought we should quit."

But the youngsters, lead by Vanessa Burger, now an eighth-grader, took the initiative, placed posters around the town and rekindled the collection effort.

"I didn't want to quit," said Burger. "They had kept it going so long. We couldn't stop. Besides, we were half way there."

King said the collection developed into a community project. "People from Benton, Oran, Kelso all have contributed," she said. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends ... all saved tabs for the collection."

Today, students will scoop their million tabs into barrels. Saturday the collection will be recycled and students hope to net over $300. The money will be used to purchase something for the school.

King said she has no plans to collect anything else.