A little girl with an indomitable spirit is hoping for a dream room designed by Anita Ferron’s Daniel Hand High School (DHHS) students and delivered by the shoreline Art from the Heart team, a small group of shoreline volunteers gathered through Connecticut’s Circle of Care for Families with Cancer.

Helping design and deliver a dream room for eight-year-old Chloe Mason-Mann, who lives with Down syndrome and is battling cancer, will be Anita’s 11th and final project as part of Art from the Heart. In addition to Anita, the shoreline Art from the Heart organizational team includes Tina Garrity, Carol Newton, Abigail Sperry, Lindsay Johnson, and Joanne Noonan.

To help make Chloe’s dream come true, Anita’s hoping the community will support a fundraiser at a Guilford restaurant. On Thursday, April 27, from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., guests who mention Chloe’s Dream Room to their server at KC’s Restaurant & Pub, 725 Boston Post Road, will contribute 20 percent of sales from their meal to materials and other costs to create Chloe’s dream room.

“Chloe likes bright colors and she really adores Nick Fradiani,” Jr., Guilford’s American Idol star, says Anita. “So we’re going to showcase several pictures of him for her.”

In fact, the American Idol (Season 14) winner visited Chloe at her Guilford home for her eighth birthday in August 2016. Fradiani brought his guitar and sang for Chloe on what was a very good day in a year that began with Chloe’s leukemia diagnosis in January 2016, followed by months of treatment and hospital visits. Friends and fans of Chloe are kept up-to-date on her progress and on support efforts underway to help her and her family, on Facebook at “Fight for Chloe.”

Anita and her students learned more about Chloe and her special bond with the American Idol by visiting the family earlier this year. As she has every year since 2007, Anita, who teaches family consumer science classes at DHHS, enlists students from her classes and DHHS Future Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), a community service-oriented club that Anita advises, to join the dream room’s creative design and build team.

An educator of 41 years who will retire from her DHHS post of 38 years when school ends this June, Anita credits Garrity with helping her, and her students, to get involved with shoreline Art from the Heart. Anita first met Garrity as a teaching colleague.

“Years ago, before Tina was married, she was a math teacher at our high school. When she became involved with Circle of Care, I was very happy that she contacted me. Art from the Heart is just one of the programs of Circle of Care, which is the big charity developed by three women from Connecticut,” says Anita.

Circle of Care for Families with Cancer is a Wilton-based not-for-profit, volunteer-driven organization that supports Connecticut children with cancer and their families during treatment. Its main projects are Bags of Love (essentials for newly diagnosed patient and caregivers during hospitalization), Lifeline Emergency Funds, Smilow Cancer Center hospital volunteers, the Purple Pages (a compilation resources for families with cancer), Lifeline Emotional Support network, and Art from the Heart.

The Start of the Circle

When Circle of Care began its shoreline Art for the Heart project in 2007, “Tina approached me about my interior design class and asked if they might be interested in re-designing a bedroom for a child who has cancer. I thought it was a perfect project for the class,” says Anita.

Art from the Heart’s first project was completed for a 17 year-old New London teen, followed by nine additional annual projects assisting shoreline children ranging in age from 4 to 15 over the ensuing years.

Anita and her students begin working on each new Art from the Heart project in January with a goal of completing the room by April or May. The students come up with the concept, help craft items, paint the walls, and do other work as part of the makeover, becoming an integral part of each project, says Anita.

“My FCCLA students do a service project each month, so this becomes their [January to May] project, and my interior design students come up with an idea for the room and paint colors and other elements.”

To come up with the design Chloe dreams of, Anita and her students visited Chloe and her family at their home in March.

“We measured out the room and took a look at the space and took pictures and found out from her parents and from Chloe what she would like in the room,” says Anita. “From that, my students draw up an architectural drawing of the room. Then they come up with two different design boards for the room, and then the family picks.”

That’s only the beginning of the process for Anita and her students. From the point of selection, she guides her kids in classes to help create some of the items that will go into the room. When it comes time to bring it all together, the students will go back to Guilford to help complete the make-over.

“Right now, we’re in the process of making the curtains and we’re making a quilt for her bed,” says Anita. “So these projects really allow my students to put what they learn to some practical use. Other classes may have students do up a design board, but very seldom do they actually see the room come true. My students see it happen over one weekend. They help empty the room, prime the walls, paint it and redecorate it, and put everything back into the room.”

Gaining ‘Adulting’ Skills

Anita is passionate about her role as a family consumer sciences teacher and is well aware of the rising call to bring what many Baby Boomers and Gen-Xr’s remember as “home economics” back into school buildings where districts have cut away offerings.

“It’s happening at a number of schools, but at our school in Madison, our numbers for our students are very strong,” says Anita, while also noting, as a sign of the times, “You can no longer get a [college] degree in family economics and consumer sciences in Connecticut.”

Home economics classes in high schools can help students learn the basics of what millennials are now calling “adulting” problems—including how to balance a check book, how to scramble an egg, or how to sew on a button. The courses can include a wide range of life skills, including food and nutrition, personal finance, family resource management and planning, textiles and clothing, shelter and housing, consumerism and consumer science, household management, design and technology, food science and hospitality, and more.

“I say to all my students, on the first day of every one of my classes, ‘What you’re going to learn in my class you will use the rest of your life. You’re going to use the skills I teach you,’” says Anita. “They’ll learn math practical skills that will help them paint their house by figuring out how much paint they’ll want to buy, or [learn how] to remodel; they can learn child development skills or even skills from fashion merchandising that can help you when you go shopping and you’re looking at quality of clothing.”

A member of the International Federation of Home Economists (IFHE), Anita was asked to be a presenter at last summer’s IFHE World Congress. The West Haven resident put together a PowerPoint presentation and headed off to South Korea to talk to her peers from around the world.

“They have a congress every four years and this past summer, the theme of it was School, Community, Family and Well-being. I thought what I have done with Art from the Heart is all of that, so I did a presentation on it.”

For the shoreline team of Art from the Heart and for Anita’s many students who have been involved in local projects through the years, efforts from fundraising to designing and completing a dream room for a special child is more than just a rewarding labor of love.

“It really brings the community together to support the family. It’s heartwarming,” says Anita.

To support Art From the Heart and help make a Dream Room for Chloe, visit KC’s Pub & Restaurant, 725 Boston Post Road, Guilford anytime between 11:30 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Thursday, April 27; mention Dream Room for Chloe and 20 percent of the meal sales will be donated help fund the make-over. For more information, contact Tina Garrity at ting45@aol.com.