Flat Stanley's Belvoir Adventure

Flat Stanley has traveled the world and now he is visiting Fort Belvoir.

“Laughter is the best medicine,” said Annie Mickle, senior consultant at Serco Inc. “[Flat Stanley] gives people a little laugh and they can forget about things for a while.”

Based on a series of children’s books written by Jeff Brown in the 1960s, Flat Stanley is a little boy who was flattened by an enormous bulletin board that his father gave him for Christmas. In the stories he goes on a variety of adventures and discovers that he can do many things as a flat person.

Serco, headquartered in Vienna, Va., joined forces with Stenwood Elementary School to give Flat Stanley the adventures of a lifetime.

Mickle volunteered along with several other Serco employees to help the school by taking Flat Stanley on various adventures in the area and documenting those trips.
Since coming to Belvoir, Flat Stanley has visited DeWitt Health Care Network, the South Post Golf Course, the Fort Belvoir Fire Department and many other locations on the installation.

Stanley’s visit to Belvoir is part of the larger Flat Stanley Project, which was started in 1995 when 13 schools in Canada and the United States started making paper cutouts of the character and sending him to different schools. The students who receive Flat Stanley make a journal depicting his adventures before he is returned to the original school, according the official Flat Stanley Project Web site www.flatstanleyproject.net.

Mickle is currently working on a scrapbook depicting all of Flat Stanley’s adventures on Fort Belvoir, like receiving a Coin of Excellence from Defense Threat Reduction Agency Deputy Director Maj. Gen. Randal R. Castro and getting a trim at the new day spa on Fort Belvoir.

She will send the coin and many other souvenirs back with Stanley so the students can see what he has been up to over the past few weeks.