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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

School's penny pinch solved

Credit union vows to accept big haul

By: Murray McNeill

Posted: 06/17/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

WAYNE.GLOWACKI@FREEPRESS.MB.CA Enlarge Image

Students and staff at St. John’s High School gather over one million pennies on their gym floor for CancerCare Manitoba.

SUSAN Engstrom has found her knight in shining armour, and it's a small-town credit union.

The education instructor at St. John's High School had been running into a brick wall in her efforts to find a financial institution willing to take 1.3 million pennies the school's staff and students had collected over the past four years for cancer treatment and research.

They collected the pennies in honour of teacher Randy Engstrom (Susan's husband) and education assistant Steve Slack, who both died from cancer.

The problem is they have dozens upon dozens of ice cream pails full of pennies -- she's not sure exactly how many altogether. And they have to be counted, put into rolls and converted into cash -- roughly $13,000 worth -- before the school can turn it over to CancerCare Manitoba and the Canadian Cancer Society.

Engstrom said the school doesn't have the time or the volunteers to tackle such a monumental task. So she started working the phones trying to find a local bank or credit union that would do it.

She said she contacted all five big chartered banks and other credit unions over the past month or so.

"I went through channel after channel and they all got back to me and said 'No, that would overwhelm our bank,' " she said in an interview Wednesday.

She even tried calling the Royal Canadian Mint and Brink's Canada, who told her to call a financial institution.

Finally, someone told her to try the Starbuck Credit Union branch in Headingley, and the manager there agreed to take on the job. Now she's hoping he won't have a change of heart next week when they start hauling in their buckets of pennies.

She said they'll deliver them in ice-cream pails because that's about all they can carry at one time. She estimates each pail weighs about 13.5 kilograms.

"If he gives me the boot, I'll have to jump off a bridge because I don't know what I'll do with them!" she added.

But the branch's office supervisor, Charlene Glowatski, said that's not going to happen.

"It's such a big quantity that we're not quite sure how we'll do it," she admitted. "But where there's a will, there's a way. We'll get it done."

Thankfully, the branch acquired a coin-counting machine and a coin-rolling machine earlier this year. And the staff have had lots of practice using them, which should help.

She said the pennies have to be counted and put into rolls (50 pennies per roll), then packed into boxes (50 rolls per box). She hasn't figured out yet how many rolls or boxes that will be, or how long it's going to take to do it. But it's safe to say it's going to be a lot of rolls, a lot of boxes and a lot of hours.

Once the pennies are boxed, they'll pay Brink's to take them away.

Engstrom said she plans to deliver the pennies in batches, rather than all once, spread out over time.

"We don't want to overwhelm the credit union," she added.

murray.mcneill@freepresspress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 17, 2010 B5

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