Feeding the Need: Food drive exceeds 30,000-pound goal, shatters previous record

Sandra Omari-Botang/Feature Editor

The 2011 student food drive kicked off on Oct. 3 and ended on Monday, Nov. 14.

Cedar Falls High School had about seven weeks to collect 30,000 pounds of food, and all of the food and proceeds collected went to the Northeast Iowa Food Bank.

Throughout the weeks, each third hour class collected cans and money to contribute to the food drive.

Other than just the classrooms raising cans and money, the leadership groups have played an important role in raising funds.

There have been many leadership-sponsored events such as the silent auctions, paying off parking tickets, library fines and detention minutes with cans of food.

They also had the duct tape a teacher, dress up on Halloween, minute to win it games, school spirit T-shirts and other fun ways to get involved this year.

The leadership groups were also in charge of going to spend the money that was collected at the various grocery stores such as Walmart, HyVee, ALDI and Fareway.

After buying the food, the leadership groups also packed all the food into boxes and took it to present to the Northeast Iowa Food Bank.

As a school we raised over 32,000 pounds of food.

As of last Friday, the school was down from last year’s total, but that estimate didn’t include everything that the leadership groups had collected.

“We could always set the bar higher.

We could do it.

Cedar Falls is definitely a school who was the opportunity to give we just need to realize that we can do more,” counselor Erin Gardner said.

The top classrooms that have raised the most are from teachers Kenton Swartly, Emily Wheeler, Doug Wilkenson and Chad VanCleve.

Some classes did some creative things to try to raise the most that they could.

Students in English teacher Marguerite DeMoss and Judy Timmins’ classes were competing against each other to see which class could collect the most.

VanCleve’s class alone raised over 2,000 cans.

In the end, they had about 204 cans per student.

This class did a lot of things to raise donations.

They went around to different neighborhoods collecting donations and also went HyVee and both the Waterloo and Cedar Falls Fareways to try and collect donations for the costumers and make them aware of what was going on with the food drive.

“For some teachers without third hours and just teachers in general, there were other things we did to support the food drive like buying a school shirt or paying to be able wear jeans on those two days they were offered,” mathematics teacher Linsey Zimmerman said.

Class of 2014

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