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May 15, 2018
Middle and high school students sponsor food & clothing drive
Conceptual Algebra students at Fort Couch Middle School and Upper St. Clair High School are once again teaming up to help those less fortunate. The students are hosting a food and clothing drive from May 22-25, 2018, to benefit the Greater Washington County Food Bank.
Nonperishable food items and new or gently used clothing items can be dropped off in the main office or back lobby of Fort Couch Middle School and in the Upper St. Clair High School’s main office or counseling center. Both locations will also accept monetary donations for the food bank as well.
This marks the seventh year that the Conceptual Algebra classes have collaborated on a food drive project. Coordinating the outreach effort are Shannon Strayer, high school math teacher, and Michelle Senneway, Fort Couch math teacher.
“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.”
Students are assigned a variety of tasks including collecting the food, counting and sort items and calculating the total value.
“We use a Google document to compare Fort Couch’s donations and the high school’s donations to make a it a bit more interactive,” Mrs. Strayer added.
In addition to their collection efforts, students will spend a day volunteering at the Greater Washington County Food Bank where they will tend to the gardens, organize food donations by type, pack boxes of food items for distribution and sort clothing in the thrift store. Fort Couch students will volunteer on May 31 and high school students will help out on June 5.
Last year students collected 4,326 food/clothing items and $700 in monetary donations to benefit the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
