DIXFIELD – A child’s simple desire to help tsunami victims brought in more than 200 pounds of quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.

After watching news footage of the Indian Ocean disaster and discussing it in a class, 12-year-old Brooke Kersey, a 6th-grader at Dirigo Middle School, decided last week to get her classmates involved in a humanitarian project for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“I felt bad about what happened there after we talked about it in science,” Kersey said Friday morning, the last day of the collective effort.

“They were less fortunate than us, and I felt we should pitch in and help them, so us kids don’t feel left out,” she said.

Kersey challenged her classmates and other Dirigo Middle School sixth-grade homerooms to collect 9 pounds of coins in five days.

The 9 pounds, Kersey said, was chosen to represent the Richter Scale classification for the 9.0 earthquake that spawned the tsunami.

As an added incentive, the homeroom with the most coins would win a pizza party.

But the children got carried away and gathered more than 200 pounds of pocket change. Teacher Mary Hersom’s homeroom led Friday morning with 50 pounds.

Employees at the Oxford Federal Credit Union have offered to count the coins using a machine, said Kersey’s homeroom teacher Bob Staples.

He said that last week’s aid effort wasn’t a first for his 6-1 class of students.

“At Christmastime, this class decided they didn’t want to exchange Christmas presents with each other. Instead, they raised money to buy presents for unfortunate children, and they bought everything on the list. They’re a pretty special class,” he said.