Team leader Father David Hoefler celebrates after the faculty of Blessed Sacrament School, Springfield, won first place in the Springfield Catholic Schools Week volleyball tournament as well as the Spirit Award. This is the fourth year in a row that the school has won the Spirit Award, while they have taken first place in the tournament three out of the past four years.

Springfield Catholic grade school faculty members kicked off Catholic Schools Week by competing in a volleyball tournament fund-raiser that will benefit another school an ocean and continent away.

The annual tournament, which was held on Sunday, Jan. 27 at the Sacred Heart-Griffin High School west campus gym, benefited the building of a preschool in Swaziland, Africa. Adam Kohlrus, a graduate of Blessed Sacrament School, Sacred Heart-Griffin High School and Loyola University, is organizing the project as part of his service as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Kohlrus, who has been serving in Swaziland for 20 months, recognized the need for a new preschool in the community of Emphini, which has a population of 1,200. The current single-room school has had as many as 67 students at a time, but attendance has declined due to crowded conditions, explained Blessed Sacrament principal Kathy Wear in the parish bulletin.

Now the primary school in the community has announced they will not accept students who have not attended preschool. This means that unless the preschool is expanded, many children will be unable to attend school there.

The planned preschool will provide a larger building that is more conducive to learning. Tuition will be charged, but scholarships will also be available for orphans and vulnerable children. The tuition will  include one meal per day that will be prepared in the facility.

Proceeds from the admission and concessions at the annual competition totaled about $3,200, said Blessed Sacrament development director Kim Hoffman. The team from Blessed Sacrament took first place in the tournament competition. The school also won the Spirit Award for having the highest per capita attendance, Hoffman said. The school has won the tournament three out of the past four years and the Spirit Award four years in a row.

Because Kohlrus is a 1998 graduate of Blessed Sacrament, the fifth-graders at the school are also conducting a mission coin drive to raise additional funds for the preschool. During Catholic Schools Week the students collected pennies for the project. The first week of February they collected nickels. They are asking for donations of dimes the school week of Feb. 11, quarters during the week of Feb. 18 and bills of any denomination during the week of Feb. 25.  
The Emphini community is contributing 25 percent of the total project cost and is already collecting materials and recruiting community members to help with the construction when the other materials can be obtained. Altogether, funding of just over $9,180 is needed to support the community in its efforts to build the preschool.