Beating their record

Times Reporter

 

Anyone who walked into the front doors of Wheatland Elementary School from Nov. 29 to Dec. 6 might have thought the school was packing up old supplies. 

Just inside the front entrance, boxes were stacked high, full of food items the school had collected to donate to the Christmas Hamper Society. 

“These are all of our hidden volunteers, there are just hundreds of school kids out there who work behind the scenes to gather in food.  All of the schools within the Strathmore and district area, they just do a tremendous job,” said Dave Collins, chairperson for the society.

Grade 6 students from the student leadership council gathered 4,237 items to donate to the Christmas Hamper Society this. The highest record for the school previously was 4,036 items collected in 2008. Students and staff were amazed and happy to beat the previous record. 

Every month there is a Virtue of the Month for the students. For the month of December the virtue is Generosity.

“It’s great because it’s something tangible that they can see,” said Michelle Rushford, associate principal. 

Each day there was a different theme for what items the students wanted to collect. Brandon Pederson said cans was his favourite theme day of the week. 

“They came every day,” said Pederson. 

“It was interesting to see what people brought,” said Mitchell Hardy.

“I thought the pasta was really good. There was a bunch of different kinds, like microwave noodles and Kraft Dinner and stuff,” said Claire Webb. Josh Christiano liked dessert day out of the theme days. 

“When we did desserts, we got a lot of those too. We got a lot of cake mixes and stuff like that,” said Christiano.

Wheatland Elementary hasn’t been the only school collecting donations to help out the society; all of the schools have been doing their part to gather what they can.  

“What the schools get, generally speaking, seems to be a real cross section of staples. When you’re collecting from seven or eight schools and they are all collecting different items, then at the end of the day when you sort of mix and match all of those items, you come out with a pretty good selection of stuff,” said Collins. 

The Grade 6 students at Wheatland Elementary gathered, sorted and boxed up the items, and on Dec. 6 they helped load the items onto the trucks. It took five trucks to be able to take all of the items to the society.