Calhoun cares about chordoma

For more than a week, Calhoun High School senior Tyler Seaman looked for just the right words to tell his classmates how he feels about them. He said he wanted to say thanks to them, as well as to his teachers and school administrators.

In return, students and faculty were preparing to take to the Calhoun auditorium stage to sing, dance and perform in the school’s first student-faculty talent show to benefit the Chordoma Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to finding a cure for this extremely rare form of cancer.

Seaman's long battle with the disease kept the 17-year-old out of Calhoun for more than two years. Though he worried he would return this fall to an apathetic group of peers, he said he found a community of friends who gave him the reassurance and help he needed to put together the fundraiser -- a feat that he once thought impossible.

“To have a student body who will stand behind me and support me just means so much,” he said. “The encouragement of my friends to go through with this has helped a lot. I could have done the same thing last year, and I thought about it, but I didn’t think I had the encouragement and the support that I needed.”

Chordoma is a malignant bone cancer that develops in the skull base and spine, and affects only about 300 people in the U.S. every year, according to the foundation.

In particular, Seaman found allies in Students Against Destructive Decisions and Key Club. He also credited Keri Cinelli, a health and phys.-ed. teacher, with organizing a highly anticipated Calhoun faculty version of the YouTube viral video sensation, “The Evolution of Dance.”

While Seaman found help inside the school, he said it was his mother, Diane Seaman, president of the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District Board of Education, who gave him the courage to help others.

While Seaman was spending the summer as a camp counselor in the Adirondack Mountains, he said his mother called him with regular updates about a friend he made through the Chordoma Foundation. While Seaman was enjoying the outdoors, his friend was wheelchair-bound, suffering through her sixth regrowth of the cancer.

“It just made me wonder why I’m in camp and she was in a hospital,” Seaman said.