Our Elementary School just wrapped up the annual Read-a-Thon. For the first time this year, our ES students, faculty, and parents have chosen a local non-profit to benefit from their reading efforts. This year, our community chose The Hunger Coalition and turned the Read-a-Thon into a Read-to-Feed. Throughout the Read-to-Feed two-week event, our students immersed themselves in aspects of The Hunger Coalition's work to better understand food insecurity and the ways a local community can come together to fight hunger. They toured The Hunger Coalition's warehouse, planted seeds that they will donate to The Hope Garden, and ran a canned food drive during which they collected nearly 1,500 pounds of canned foods to add to The Hunger Coalition's supply. Our students also raised money for reading during the course of the read-a-thon. After our K-5th grade students accumulated 74,376 minutes of reading, we are proud to announce that they presented a check to The Hunger Coalition at the end of the week for $13,000 to support the work that the organization does to fight hunger in our community.
The read-a-thon was an excellent opportunity to celebrate and encourage a love of reading, but it's also a good chance for students to connect to our larger community through service and answer a need.