Kieran Nicholson Denver Post Staff Writer March 10 - Pity the poor penny.
Many folks consider it worthless and unwanted.
Not the students and staff at Columbine Hills Elementary School. For years, they've chipped in a penny here, a penny there, to a project that started as a math lesson. The school's students, about 480 of them, are scheduled to hold an assembly today and shower fifth-grade teacher Steve Christiansen with current contributions, collected in the classrooms, as he lays atop a pile of about 400,000 pennies. Christiansen started the project in hopes of collecting 1 million pennies to teach students about mass and volume. After the April 20 shootings at Columbine High, when the penny tally was about 300,000, Christiansen and the school decided to give the pennies to a Columbine relief effort.