Food and clothing drive makes an impact

Students recently collected 4,326 food and clothing items and more than $700 to benefit the Greater Washington County Food Bank.

Conceptual Algebra students at Fort Couch Middle School and Upper St. Clair High School teamed up for the annual community service project. Coordinating the outreach effort are Shannon Strayer, high school math teacher, and Michelle Senneway, Fort Couch math teacher.

“This year’s project was a great success,” Mrs. Senneway said. “We more than doubled both our in-kind and monetary donations for the food bank.”

The food and clothing drive provided an opportunity for Upper St. Clair students to help others in need while reflecting on their own lives.

“It’s important to volunteer because we have great lives and helping someone else have a great life is amazing,” eighth grader Keating Leavey said.

In addition to collecting food and clothing, students spent time volunteering in various capacities at the food bank. They loaded and unloaded donations, sorted items, packed senior boxes and planted apple trees.

“The people who work at the food bank need help with every part of the process so that others can get the food that they need,” eighth grader Marlena Bononi said.

This marked the sixth year that the Conceptual Algebra classes have collaborated on a food drive project. Teachers find creative ways to link the service project to mathematical concepts in the classroom.

“We link the food and clothing drive to our algebra classes by creating an algebra equation or inequality (depending which course a student is in) and graph the results daily,” Mrs. Strayer said. “We value all food and clothing donations at $1.25 each and with the combination of all money and food/clothing collected want to have a ‘total value’ of at least $1,000. We discuss how many more items/money needs to be donated in order to hit the goal.”

This year is the first time that the groups have added the clothing component to their outreach project.