Last month North Central Elementary School in Williams County launched hundreds of balloons to celebrate three students who beat cancer. Now those messages of hope are being found hundreds of miles away.
13 ABC's Christine Long spent the day in the Village of Pioneer about 50 miles west of Toledo near the Indiana border and reports how the three young cancer survivors there are inspiring people across the country.
The courageous cancer survivors honored with the balloon launch are Kindergartners Travis Turner and Caden Baker, as well as 6th grader Alexis Flynn.
"It started off small to cheer these kids on that beat cancer and it ballooned into something bigger," says Ashley Stewart, Travis and Caden's Kindergarten teacher.
The immediate impact was on the Facebook page for the group "Hope Takes Flight."
"Hope truly took flight," says Ashley Moore, the preschool teacher at North Central Elementary. "As soon as you guys ran the story, every time we logged on Facebook we had eight to ten new friend requests every time."
Then e-mails started coming in from people who found the balloons. Some people even sent pictures, including a man who found a few balloons 500 miles away in New York.
"The kids have been so excited about that because it's kind of turning into a geography lesson, too," says Moore.
That man wrote that his wife is a breast cancer survivor. He says, "We are celebrating along with all of you!"
"The people they've gone to were people who were meant to get them because they each had a personal story with cancer. So it has been very touching," says Moore.
A woman in LaGrange, Ohio, found a balloon while shoveling her driveway.
"When she picked it up she saw it was this shredded balloon and there was this note attached. And in her e-mail she said the balloon was shredded, but the note was still there which gave us goose bumps," says Stewart.
"The lady in LaGrange said, ‘How the notes have survived is beyond us.' It truly makes you believe," says Moore.
At the request of the high school principal in Pioneer, NFL quarterback Brady Quinn re-tweeted a message about the three cancer survivors at North Central Elementary.
"I think he's got like 30,000 followers, so when he re-tweeted that all of his followers saw that. So there's 30,000 people who saw what we're doing here," says Moore.
"It has just been an amazing experience," says Stewart.
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