Cliff Buchan
News EditorStudents at Southwest Junior High School have learned they can do some good while learning.
Thanks to a spring project carried out by seven students in the sixth period Learning Center, more than 2500 books, notebooks and personal care items have been collected for homeless children and their families in the Cambridge area.
The students, taught by Marge Burns-Hook, in planning the group project, decided by consensus that they wanted to do something to help homeless children.
The items collected in early May went to New Pathways, Inc., an agency that serves families with children in the Cambridge area. New Pathways, Inc. is made up of 15 churches in Isanti, Mille Lacs, Pine, Kanabec and Chisago counties and is headquartered in Cambridge.
Burns-Hook said the goal of the project was to find a way to get books and personal care items to the homeless children.
In planning the project, the students met with some of the homeless kids and conducted interviews with photographs to assist with the writing of a script to accompany a video presentation. The video presentation was shown to all of the homerooms at Southwest and students were challenged to take part in the drive.
ìWhatever we got would have been fine,î Burns-Hook said.
With the encouragement of the Learning Center student project, students and staff took the challenge to heart with a two-week drive in late April and early May.
Thanks to the efforts of Principal Marc Peterson, students in the top homerooms and the Learning Center students were treated to breakfast or lunch at McDonaldís as a special project incentive.
Bruce Hafftenís homeroom was the top room with 201 items collected. Teachers Tom Cooper and Linda Nagolskiís homerooms were second and third in the drive, respectively.
On May 12, the students and Burns-Hook packed the items in two vans and made the trip to Cambridge to drop off the items.
New Pathways, Inc. offers a day center and utilizes churches on a rotating schedule to house homeless families on a temporary basis.
Burns-Hook, a volunteer with the agency, said the students quickly took to the idea of using a school project as a way to help other kids in need. ìWeíve had families from Forest Lake in the program,î she said.
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