ST. PAUL – Students at the École Racette Junior High School recently rallied together and collected 620 pounds (281.2 kg) of food for the St. Paul & District Food Bank.
The effort was part of the students’ leadership class, where they thought of ways they could help the community. Ultimately, they decided to collect food to donate to the local food bank.
Several students participated in the ‘Foodbank Project,’ which was a joint project between Leadership 9 students and Racette’s Community Service Team.
Leadership 9, an option course for junior high students, is a Career and Technology Foundations course all Grade 9 students are enrolled in. The Community Service Team is made up of Grade 6 to 9 volunteer students who organize, volunteer, and participate in various activities throughout the community, explained Andrea Austin, principal at Racette.
Kylie Field, a temp working with the Leadership 9 class, says she is very proud of what the students accomplished. Not only did they collect a large amount of food, but they also managed to bring the whole school together.
“I’m just really proud of them for stepping up and seeing the importance of the food drive... the result was amazing,” says Field.
Lauren Lacroix and Kalli Foisy are among the Grade 9 leadership class students who took part in the project. The students explained some of the processes involved in the food drive, such as creating posters to advertise the initiative, along with writing and making announcements to ensure the word was being spread.
Lacroix says they also offered a pizza party prize for the student group that collected the most food.
“So, everyone was a little more eager to get in on it,” she said, acknowledging with a smile that pizza is “a really great motivator.”
Both students agreed that it was a good feeling to be able to help those in need. Foisy believes every person deserves a meal, while Lacroix recognizes there are people in need of food in the community.
Lacroix says she learned that when people are struggling, other people “usually come together and help support each other, and that’s a really great thing.”
Foisy nodded, and added, “We learned that the more you come together, the more you can help people out... Everybody in the school, and everybody outside of the school, we all [collected] food. We all just started connecting better.”
Larry Lambert, chair of the St. Paul & District Food Bank, says he is grateful for what the students did. He explained that it costs approximately $5.75 for every kilogram of food, which means the students raised over $1,600 worth of food.
“This is a big lift for us,” says Lambert. “It provides us the ability to help more people, but also helps the kids understand that they’re doing something worthwhile.”
