Prairie View students organize food drive
By Tracy Ouellette
SLN Staff
Three fourth graders at Prairie View Elementary School in East Troy have organized a food drive at the school the week of Feb. 20 to 24 to help fight hunger in the area.
Jordan Volkman, Emily Ruszkiewicz and Kiersten Kreuzinger encouraged their classmates to bring in at least one non-perishable food item each day this week to be donated to the East Troy Food Pantry.
“It’s a student-driven effort that came out of discussions about Valentine’s Day and the Jump Rope for Heart event with the American Heart Association,” Prairie View Principal Mark Weerts said. “The kids got to talking about what they could do to show they ‘had heart’ about the community. They came up with ‘Put your Heart into Donating Food.’”
Weerts said they met with a representative from the food pantry to talk about the specific needs in the community and then started planning how to involve the whole school and how to promote the idea.
“Their goal is one can per person, so that would mean 400-plus cans,” he said.
“You can bring in things like toothpaste, too,” Kreuzinger said. “They need things like that.”
The kids said they were concerned that some of the area’s families might not have enough money to put food on the table and thought they should do something about that.
“We’re trying to stop hunger here,” Ruszkiewicz said.
“The food pantry goes down each month and they need more stuff,” Volkman added.
Weerts said the students were full of questions for the food pantry representative and wanted to know how it worked and what the most pressing needs were.
“We found out a lot of people are hungry in the winter,” Ruszkiewicz said.
“They can’t get to the food pantry when the roads are bad,” Kreuzinger added.
Weerts said the three students had a daily job of going around to the crates by each classroom during lunch/recess to collect the donated food. They have kept track of how much each classroom donated and there was an incentive for the classroom with the highest numbers after the drive is finished.
“The class with the most will get recess with Mr. Weerts,” Kreuzinger said.
But the contest is not the motivating factor here, the kids said. It’s raising awareness that it could be their friends or neighbors who don’t have enough to eat.
“We just want to help people out,” Volkman said.
