Slauterbeck collects mounds of jeans for homeless teens

PORT CLINTON – Ashlynn Slauterbeck knows how to wear soft jeans and an even softer heart. The Port Clinton High School senior organized a jean drive benefitting homeless teens this past winter, and in the fall she hosted an anti-bullying seminar for middle school students.

Slauterbeck, 18, heard about the Teens for Jeans program while researching scholarship opportunities. The program asked teens to donate jeans for homeless teens in exchange for chances at a scholarship drawing, but Slauterbeck took the drive far beyond an opportunity to earn scholarship money by collecting over 500 pairs of jeans.

Teens for Jeans is sponsored by Aeropostale, and Slauterbeck dropped the jeans off at the Sandusky store at the end of the drive.

“We trucked bunches of bags there. They were ecstatic. They didn’t even know where to put the bags, there were so many,” Slauterbeck said.

She was surprised to learn that teen homelessness is a serious problem in America.

“As I started researching it, I realized how many teens are affected by homelessness,” she said.

“In the Teens for Jeans program, all of the jeans are kept local, so all the jeans I collected went to teens in Northwest Ohio,” Slauterbeck said.

The scholarship winner was chosen at random. Although Slauterbeck did not win any scholarship money, she gained something better – a bigger worldview.

“In the U.S., one million teens are homeless yearly, and their most requested product is jeans, which is something so many people take for granted,” she said.

Slauterbeck’s jean drive was a project she organized as part of her membership in DECA. Port Clinton High School Marketing Educator and DECA Advisor Bill Hollister said DECA “prepares emerging leaders and gets kids ready for the business world.”

Slauterbeck has made it to state DECA competitions the last two years. She won second in the Business Services competition at districts last year, and she won third in Professional Selling at district this year. ollister said Slauterbeck has been a great asset to this year’s DECA program.

“She is an awesome kid. She’s done a lot of things for the program and definitely made a positive impact on it,” he said.

Last fall, Slauterbeck organized an anti-bullying seminar for students from Port Clinton Middle School. The middle school students viewed a slideshow which described the different types of bullying and taught them how to respond to them.

During group sessions, the youths engaged in a role-playing activity that gave them a taste of the harmfulness of bullying, and they finished the event with an activity called “Wrinkled Wanda” in which kids wrote bullying messages on a paper cutout of a person.

“The kids took markers and wrote down school-appropriate things that had been said to them or that they had heard said. In my group, we let them rip it up, wrinkle it, and throw it in a box,” Slauterbeck said. “That was supposed to demonstrate throwing away the negative and mean words.”

Slauterbeck initiated the anti-bullying seminar in response to her own experiences, which she shared during the event.

“Bullying had a huge impact on me. I was bullied a lot my freshman and sophomore years,” she said. “I didn’t want kids to feel like I did. I talked to them about my experiences and about what I would have done differently.”

Slauterbeck has always lived in Ottawa County, and she hopes to return to Port Clinton after college.

“I’m attending Tiffin University for Integrated Social Studies Education next year,” she said. “I would love to come back to the area and be a fifth or sixth grade teacher. That is my dream – Port Clinton is just home.”