Laurel Highlands students walk for breast cancer awareness

Laurel Highlands students walk for breast cancer awareness

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Laurel Highlands 10th-grade students Nevaeh Hall, left, and Haven Harris were some of the students who posed for photos inside the "Kiss Cancer Goodbye" frame at a student-organized breast cancer awareness walk. [Garrett Neese]

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Laurel Highlands High School business teacher Jennifer Neill, 10th-grader Chloe Komacko, and world language/Spanish teacher Kurtis Gantzhorn pose for a photo during a breast cancer awareness walk organized by Komacko. [Garrett Neese]

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Students and teachers from Laurel Highlands High School walked several laps around the track last month to promote breast cancer awareness.

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More than 100 Laurel Highlands High School students participated in last month's Warrior Walk, the culmination of a month of activities at the school to promote awareness of breast cancer. [Garrett Neese]

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The Laurel Highlands High School track became a sea of pink Oct. 28 as more than 100 students and teachers walked several laps to promote breast cancer awareness and raise funds to help breast cancer patients.

The Warrior Walk was the culmination of a month of breast cancer awareness activities at Laurel Highlands High School.

It began last month when Chloe Komacko, a 10th-grade student at Laurel Highlands, approached business teacher Jennifer Neill with the idea of wearing pink each Wednesday in October to honor her mother, a breast cancer survivor, and other women battling cancer.

From there, Neill said, they decided, “We can do more.”

Komacko’s mother heard from someone at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center in Uniontown about a group of church ladies who make “dignity robes,” which provide cover for the women at the clinic when they’re undergoing treatments.

But to make those robes, they still need to buy the material.

So Komacko launched a fundraiser, capped off by the walk, to honor the local women battling breast cancer.

“To honor them and support them and show their like courage and fight, I wanted to do something,” Komacko said. “And I thought the Warrior Walk would be a perfect place to showcase that.”

The fundraiser started slowly, but took off in the last few days of the month, Neill said, raising more than $1,500.

To join the walk, each student and teacher had to pitch in $5. Kurtis Gantzhorn, a world language/Spanish teacher at the high school, raised another $510 at Christ United Methodist Church, where he is a pastor.

Groups at the church make a point of raising money that can go toward local charities, Gantzhorn said.

“The point of a church, in my belief, is to give back,” he said.

Komacko was grateful — for the support her friends gave her after her mother was diagnosed last September, and for the way the school community stepped up.

“Breast cancer is a heartbreaking, hard thing to do,” she said. “My mom’s a single mother, so a lot of it came on me and my brother to help her and get her through everything. And thankfully, she’s OK. But just seeing everybody’s support is just so meaningful because it just shows we’re all a big community that are there to support everyone.”

Neill hopes to make it an annual event. Chloe Komacko still has another year at the high school; her brother Matthew has two.

“Seeing the turnout of this first year of this and seeing the support that we have, I feel like this is something,” Neill said. “…I feel like we’re going to keep this going strong because this is such a good cause.”