All 62 students enrolled in the Sun Prairie Media Center’s unique KIDS-4 program are sporting brand new KIDS-4 shirts thanks to a $250 donation from the Sun Prairie Optimist Club and a matching $250 donation from Titley and Associates, an Allstate Agency!
“This gift is tremendously generous,” said Sun Prairie Media Center director Jeff Robbins. “In years past, the shirts were an additional cost for families enrolled in KIDS-4. Therefore, not all kids received a shirt. This year, thanks to the Optimists and Titley and Associates, every child in the program gets a shirt. I think having the shirt helps cement in each child a feeling of belonging to a unique club, which is definitely what KIDS-4 is.”
The design of the shirt is also unique; each year students enrolled in KIDS-4 submit their ideas for a t-shirt design, with the winning design picked by other kids in the program. This year’s winner is Connor Wilkinson, a fourth-grader from Eastside Elementary who attends KIDS-4 on Monday afternoons. After some minor design modifications, the shirts were printed at Ameriprint Apparel, located right here in Sun Prairie.
“I think the partnership between KIDS-4 and the Sun Prairie Optimist Club is a natural one,” said Robbins. “The Optimist Club’s motto is to be a friend of youth and to bring out the best in youth. Our KIDS-4 program, by encouraging children to be more creative, more media literate, and to be better communicators, certainly brings out the best in the kids enrolled.”
KIDS-4 is a unique program for Sun Prairie Area School District kids in grades 4-8. The classes meet once a week at the Sun Prairie Media Center from October-April, where kids learn how to produce programs and videos by performing all aspects of video production, from writing to acting to sound to directing. Programming produced in KIDS-4 airs on Charter cable channel 984 and will soon be available on TDS channels 14 and 1014.
For more information on KIDS-4, please call the Sun Prairie Media Center at 837-4193 or check out www.kids4.tv.