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"For more than 40 years, Kristy Shelton has shared her heart with lower school physical education students at Greater Atlanta Christian School and in the meantime has helped her students learn the importance of a heart-healthy lifestyle.

Along with her husband Cliff (who coached the GAC baseball team for 32 years), Shelton will take her retirement at the end of the 2024-25 school year. Besides leaving GAC she’ll also be departing from a ministry that she’s been involved with since her first year at the school.

In the 1970s, the American Heart Association introduced Jump Rope for Heart to the country, a fundraising event that benefited research and awareness of heart disease. The initiative was rebranded in 2017 as the Kids Heart Challenge, but the rope-jumping and fund-raising continues to this day.

Shelton’s introduction to the Kids Heart Challenge came during her first year as a lower school physical education teacher.

“In the spring of 1983, we chose a Saturday, and the kids that wanted to participate got into teams,” said Shelton, who is also an assistant athletic director at GAC. “Back then, they would get donations for how long they jumped. We had about 10 teams of six and jumped for three hours straight. There was always somebody jumping from each team, and they got donations. In that first year we raised $2,800 and sent it to the American Heart Association.”

And every year since then, GAC has offered the Kids Heart Challenge to its lower school students. Shelton said that in 1991, she moved the event from a Saturday to a regular school day and raised about $8,500. In 2019, the initiative at GAC crossed the million-dollar mark and this year’s Kids Heart Challenge raised more than $69,000.

In the 43 years GAC has been part of the Challenge, the school has raised $1,464,585 for the American Heart Association.

“We don’t like to set a goal of how much money we want to raise — our goal is to have 100% of our kids participate,” said Shelton, who also served as the school’s varsity volleyball and softball coach. “It doesn’t matter if you just bring in $1, that’s awesome. We just want everyone to be a part of this spring service project.”

Shelton added that PE students learn a new Scripture passage every month, and the reading during February (when the Challenge was held this year) was 2 Corinthians 9:7, which says, “You must each decide on how much to give; don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure, for God loves a person who gives cheerfully.”

“We focused (on the passage) and really put it on the kids,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many bags of change we get. We had a girl in the fourth grade who raised money but also gave us an envelope with a $100 bill. She said it was her birthday money.

“She told her mom she was giving the money and her mom tried to talk her out of it, but she quoted the Scripture and the mom cried and said, ‘Of course you should give it.’ It’s a cool story of how kids are so giving. Kids give from the heart. When there’s something that really touches them, they trust they can give their money away and they will be taken care of.”

Shelton also said that stories abound every year when the Challenge is announced. Shelton’s mother saved her father from considerable heart damage when she gave him aspirin when he had a heart attack, and she added that her husband Cliff had open-heart surgery two years ago. And this year’s story was just as compelling.

This year we had a boy in the fifth grade, Noah Kim, and he was born with heart defects,” she said. “He reached out to the American Heart Association to be an ambassador, and this year told his story. He’s had two heart surgeries as a fifth-grader, and he encouraged students to give. He told his classmates what they do is help save people’s lives, like his. We try to tie in back in our community in ways that will help the kids see it’s truly helping others.”

In addition to research and awareness, the American Heart Association awards participating schools with sports equipment from Texas-based US Games. Shelton said the gear has proven to be more than useful on and off campus.

“We have made it a dual mission to use a lot of that money from the equipment to send to our high school mission programs,” she said. “So we get jump ropes and soccer balls and footballs and all sorts of equipment that go on our mission trips in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, and a lot of mission trips in the United States, where we’re able to give our missions program $2,000 worth of sports equipment to take on their trips this year. And that’s all because of the American Heart Association.”

With retirement just around the corner, Shelton said a book she’s been reading has been helpful in providing insight into what’s next....."

Read the full story published by the Gwinnett Daily Post here.