Theodore Roosevelt High School pulled together in order to gather food items for needy families in Kent. The students from every first period class brought in cans, boxes, and potatoes through the week of Nov. 15. Classes gain points for every can they bring in, one point for cans and boxes and four points for potatoes, and the class with the most points by the end of the week won a pizza party.

Roosevelt’s Student Council and Planning Committee work jointly to tackle this drive. We all know that much aid is required for families this year and Roosevelt certainly does its share.
“All cans go to Kent Social Services (KSS),” Michaela Kline, community food drive Representative for the leadership planning committee, said.

In 2005 KSS served 31,256 hot meals, gave away 1,602 holiday food baskets, and gave 1054 children toys for the holidays (as reported by their website). “Kent Social Services depends on Roosevelt to fill the pantry,” Kline said. The organization does a lot for the community here in Kent and Roosevelt helps greatly with their cause.

Globally 16,000 children die every day from hunger, which is one child every five seconds. Hunger is an enormous, global, national, and local problem. According to the organization Bread for the World, “nearly one in four children live in house holds that struggle to put food on the table,” that includes 16.7 million children.

Students and teachers alike are very competitive at Roosevelt High School. Every year at the school it becomes a bragging game between competing teachers. Teachers and students alike write teasing poems and proudly brag about the number of cans they have collected. This year underdog, Ann Puhalla was able to beat out the competition to win first place in the challenge.

“It kind of gave me motivation” Puhalla said when asked about her competition. “People said we couldn’t beat Marquette, but we proved them wrong.” However, in the end the participants know that the real prize is helping the needy families of Kent.

“In a couple of weeks there will be a new drive for people to bring in any kind of items,” Savanna Kirtly, student body president, said. Roosevelt’s goal this year was to beat last year’s number of 16,000 Kline said. They have raised the bar by collecting over 22,000 cans for the pantries of KSS.