Students give funeral home flowers second life
It's 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and it's hard to tell if there should be a feeling of solemnity or joy while walking toward Greg Gills' science classroom at Edison Middle School.
The room is filled with flowers from a recent service at Williams-Kampp Funeral Home in Wheaton. There is no funeral procession of students into the room, however. Instead, there are smiles and Bruce Springsteen music pumping out of a pair of speakers.
The cool, black countertops of Gills' science lab are covered in yellow, red, white and the occasional blue-petaled burst of color typical of arrangements that surround caskets.
Hard at work on the arrangements are a handful of students in their early teens pulling and sorting flowers in an Edward Scissorhands flurry of creativity.
"Aha, sweet, blue flowers," remarked one student as he contemplated which flowers looked best together in a clear glass vase.
Less than 24 hours earlier, those flowers saw the tears of a grieving family. When the students are done with them, they'll bring smiles to Edison classrooms and help solve a new problem for funeral homes.
Linda Williams of Williams-Kampp Funeral Home said it's getting more and more difficult to dispose of floral arrangements in any way other than throwing them out.
Fewer nursing homes and convalescent centers will take the arrangements as allergies have become more of a concern. The arrangements also are often too big and extensive for bereaved families to take home.
"We tell families right out that we don't really have any donation sites to take the flowers to," Williams said. "It's become a huge problem."
That's where the Edison Middle School Flower Club comes in.
Whenever a funeral has leftover flowers from a service, Williams calls Edison Middle School. The office then notifies Gills that flowers are available, and he picks them up after school.
Then he starts the phone tree network for the flower club in motion. In the morning, every member without some other school commitment floods into Gills' classroom to turn the arrangements into little slices of school beautification in as many classrooms as possible.
All told, there are about 22 members of the flower club who poke in and out of Gills' classroom to help in whatever time they have available.
Many of the students multi-task, sneaking out of show choir a bit early or reviewing social study exam preparation sheets as they arrange flowers.
Club members have no problems with the funeral home origin of the flowers.
"Where did you get those?" one student asked a flower club member who was heading to a Dumpster to throw away stems and leaves.
"They came from dead people, and now we're re-using them for something new," the flower club member explained.
That's just part of the adaptive outlook Gills said is typical of his students.
"Initially, yes, there is some creepiness factor, especially if you have a ribbon that might say 'Darling mother' or something like that on the arrangement," Gills said.
"But the students know they're giving these flowers a new life and offering a service to the bereaved families. They understand how good the people feel knowing these flowers will have another use at a school."