High school students in Ann Gordon’s ninth-grade classes are collecting food and beverage can tabs as part of a community service project, with the objective to collect enough tabs to provide a Brady Buggy for the children’s ward at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital.  These handcrafted wagons, outfitted with attachments for medical necessities, allow young children who are bedridden to enjoy time away from their hospital rooms.

“The Brady Buggy wagon was created specifically to allow children and their caregivers some semblance of normalcy and comfort while navigating through their hospital stay or visit,” said Gordon. “The best feature of the wagon is that it includes a trailer hitch to tow the IV pole. This allows kids to be mobile, even during chemo treatments.”  

Gordon’s freshman classes hope to fill a water cooler bottle full of tabs to earn the money for the Brady Buggy. Once enough tabs are collected, they will be presented to Islip’s American Legion Rusy-Bohm Post 411 and American Legion Auxiliary, and the Town of Islip Youth Bureau. These organizations, in turn, will donate the money for the buggy, which costs approximately $1,000.

“Since Stony Brook is the only children’s hospital in Suffolk County, we saw a need to help with a Brady Buggy,” said Rusy-Bohm representative Joan M. Smith. “We are also helping with their current building project to enlarge the hospital and bring in medical specialists from around the country to make this hospital an all-inclusive, one-of-a-kind hospital for all children and their medical needs.”