Roanoke College students create toys for children with disabilities for holidays

This holiday season, a Roanoke College professor and some students are creating unique toys for children in the Roanoke Valley.

Frances Bosch '99, a biology professor, and approximately 50 Roanoke students are taking common children's toys, from superheros to Barbies, and altering them for children who have physical challenges. They are delivering the toys - called Toys Like Me - to hearing impaired children at Virginia Heights Elementary School in Roanoke, which houses the Roanoke Valley Regional Program for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and to patients at Roanoke's Carilion Children's Hospital.

"It's a really great cause and you get to use your everyday skills to really make a difference in somebody's life," said Roanoke College senior Shannon Barter, during a recent interview about the program with Fox WFXR.

The project bloomed from a 2016 May Term class led by Bosch in which students reconfigured dolls with casts, feeding tubes, cochlear implants and more. The class gave students insight into the worlds of children who have disabilities.

"It doesn't mean that somebody can't do things, it means that they do things a little bit differently," said Bosch in the WFXR interview. "So that's what we're doing, toys a little bit differently."

The toy drive is important because not only can a child find solace in a toy that physically represents the same hardships they are facing, but it also serves as an excellent teaching tool. Nurses and doctors at Carilion are able to show the child how to properly take care of their medical equipment and walk them through the process of the child's future medical operations by using each specially-altered toy.

Sarah Kress, director and coordinator of the Child Life Program at Carilion, said "I just gave a g-tube [gastric feeding tube] Barbie away to a little two-year-old girl yesterday, and her parents about burst into tears."

Roanoke College students, including some largely affiliated with the campus sororities, Delta Gamma and Alpha Sigma Alpha, raised money to help with purchasing the toys and alteration materials required to transform regular items into Toys Like Me toys.

Students spent much of November working on the project.