More than 500 children at Grace Hill Elementary School took home backpacks filled with pencils and glue sticks, markers, crayons and notebooks on Friday.
Not every family can afford school supplies. and halfway through the year they can run out, said Jennie Rehl, principal.
“This is huge,” Rehl said of the donation.
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Kids In Need
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The school, the Kids in Need Foundation and the local 3M office had been planning the event since November, but Rehl was holding back tears as volunteers unpacked boxes of backpacks Friday afternoon.
“Today, one of the teachers came to me and said, ‘We’re out of colored pencils, what do we do?’” Rehl said. “Every one of those backpacks has colored pencils.”
If there is enough local interest and support, the one-time giveaway could break ground for opening of a Kids In Need Foundation school resource center, Dave Smith, executive director.
“We hope that this is the forerunner for something bigger in this community,” Smith said.
The foundation operates 32 resource centers in the United States. Schedules for the centers vary. In Minneapolis, Minn., for example, teachers visit the center twice a year and pick up about $500 worth of supplies. The Kids In Need Foundation serves schools where 70 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches, an index used to measure poverty in schools.
Students at the school don’t always have everything they need and if they don’t have that extra pencil or folder, they feel they’ve let the teacher down, Rehl said. Having the resource center would be like Christmas, Rehl said, and take the burden of trying to find sponsors for school supplies off teachers and principals.
“Teachers everywhere are spending their money for kids,” she said.
A new backpack with working zippers and straps is a great gift, Rehl said. The foundation once used a cardboard briefcase to distribute school supplies, but changed to backpacks because of the need, Smith said.
Pencils are getting short this time of year, and students always need more binders, said Nelly Bravo, a fifth-grade student.
Even fifth-graders need scissors and glue for projects, Nelly said, and with every student getting the same thing, it reduces the chance for kids to compare what they have with others.
“The whole school actually gets to have the same backpack,” Nelly said.
Volunteers from the 3M Walmart team, based in Rogers, brought 550 backpacks for children and gift bags for teachers.
George Diaz, business director for the 3M Walmart team, said the company gives back nationally, but it made sense for the local office to take on the project, partly because their business is office supplies. A local team of 22 added Scotch tape, Post-it notes and scissors to the supplies in the backpacks.
“Kids, we feel, are our future. Our products are used by many, many kids and it was just a great fit,” Diaz said.
The project had a personal connection for Mike Molesso, sales manager on the Walmart team. Molesso helped coordinate the delivery.
“I grew up poor. I got free lunch. I know where these kids are coming from,” he said.
About 16 million children live under the poverty level in the United States, Smith said. The foundation reaches out to schools through teacher grants, a second response program for areas affected by disaster, teacher resource centers and backpack programs.
This is the first time a 3M office was able to help with a delivery, although the company has sponsored the foundation, Smith said. Companies often opt for back-to-school gifts, but a midyear donation is good because supplies run out, he said.
Friday’s giveaway was planned as a surprise, and when the curtain went up revealing 3M volunteers and the backpacks, students cheered. From youngest to oldest, students collected their new backpacks and headed to their classrooms to open them.
Daniel Holcomb, a fifth-grader, said it was nice for everyone to get something.
“It’s really generous because they didn’t have to do it, but they did it for everybody,” he said.