When Kate Fletcher, an English teacher at Louisa County High School in Virginia wanted to encourage her students to stay strong and push through their tedious, state-mandated reading test to graduate, she told them about her struggles as a runner. She had started getting into running at 35 and worked her way up to running 5ks and marathons and found she loved it.
So during the 2015-2016 school year, she realized she could use running to help her students even more and started collecting pledges based on how many miles she could run on the track in a day. The money goes to a scholarship fund for her students and that first year, Fletcher did an impressive 40 miles. Then the second year, she ran 50 and this year, this amazing teacher ran 100 miles in 24 hours … all for her students.
"I wanted to find a way to inspire my students to keep going when they were struggling to get to their own finish lines,” Fletcher says. “So far, we've earned over $23,000 for our scholarship fund from this year's run alone. In total, we currently have three years' worth of sustainable scholarship money.”
Source: Shape