Classroom Collection Campaign: Our Community Showed Up This Year!

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On July 12, the Alamance Chamber kicked off the eighteenth annual Classroom Collection Campaign. Often people are surprised to find out that approximately fifty-four percent of students enrolled in Alamance-Burlington Schools receive free or reduced breakfast/lunch and ten schools provide every student with free breakfast/lunch. As you can imagine, for a family struggling to make ends meet, it is unlikely that they are able to provide school supplies for the academic year. We know that parents and guardians want to provide for their children, but if parents must decide between purchasing school supplies or paying their power bill or putting gas in their car, unfortunately, school supplies fall to the bottom of the priority list.

This is where our community comes in! Whether you have kids of your own or not, there is a call to action that comes with being part of a community – to do your part to ensure we have a growing, thriving community. This starts with our children. The students that are in the classroom today, will be our community in twelve years, six years, or next year. Though we can’t take full responsibility of the outcome of each child’s life, we must do what we can to ensure basic needs are met for children. This includes providing them with the school supplies necessary for a successful school year. Remember, they will be doctors, dentists, mechanics, plumbers, bankers, etc. in our community.

Our community, as a whole, gets that and you all showed up this year! Thanks to such a generous community, we collected close to 37,000 new school supplies to support students in need! This ensured that students walked in to the first day of class with the required school supplies. It allowed parents and guardians the opportunity to take their child back to school shopping at the Student Supply Closet, where the child was able to pick out his/her own items and it didn’t cost the family a dime. It cut down on the out of pocket expenses we know teachers endure to provide their students with school supplies. Most importantly it set students up for a successful school year.

Though the campaign has officially concluded, we still have donations coming in and we welcome donations all through the year.  Once again, thank you to everyone who made this year’s campaign a success!