Butler State Police Trooper Shawn Denham never imagined the students in Christine Rice's fifth grade class at Butler Catholic would be so excited about doing homework.

That was, until he made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

"I've never seen kids wanting so much homework in my life," Denham said, laughing. "They were jumping out of their seats to get homework."

Denham challenged the students to collect an official patch from state police barracks in each of the 50 states.

Rice said collecting the patches was originally part of a lesson on writing business letters. The students were coming up with ideas on which businesses to write the letters to when Denham made the suggestion of writing to state police departments in each state.

"He encouraged the kids to write to and try to collect all 50 patches," Rice said.

Denham even sweetened the deal by telling the students the first one to get a patch would receive a prize.

Dante Dorcy took the challenge to heart and was the first student in the class to receive a response to his request for a patch.

"I went home and told my dad about it and he and I got to work on getting patches," Dorcy said.

The first patch arrived in four days and Dorcy won the special prize Denham had promised. The prize consisted of a baseball cap with the Pennsylvania State Police logo on it.

"It was pretty cool," Dorcy said. "I put it up on my bedroom wall at home."

Most of the patches were free, but 10 of the barracks required a donation in order to send it, Rice said.

Student Lauren Weiland said it was harder than she thought it would be to collect the police patches.

"The hardest part was finding the information on (the patches) once we had them," she said. "So it was hard to find how the patch was made or anything about it. It took a lot of patience."

Rice said some of the departments sent along an informational sheet about the patch, but others did not, and students had to do the research on those patches.

The students started requesting the patches in January, and as of this week, have patches for every state except New Mexico.

Denham said the students had a rough challenge, as many state police barracks will not send out their patches since Sept. 11.

"Idaho was pretty hard for them, cause since 9/11, they have a 'do not issue' directive," Denham said. "I had to call them and explain what they kids were doing before they would agree to send one."

Before the students started trying to collect the patches, they also wrote letters to the National Baseball League, requesting team logos.

The students were able to collect a few team logos before moving on to the state police patch challenge.