At West Marion High School, a class is showing their Trojan hearts for a community service project that has surpassed their teacher’s expectations.
Rhonda Polk, a teacher at West Marion and instructor for the Pearl River Community College dual credit course Smart Start, said her students took the community service project of an annual canned food drive to a whole other level this year.
The basic premise was to collect canned food items to donate to the Marion County Food Pantry for the Thanksgiving holiday. They were to create flyers for the event, keep track of who they talked to, record the hours they worked for the project daily and monitor all of the cans donated.
While in class, some of the students were discussing how to get the community more involved and they decided to get their places of business where they worked into the project. The businesses readily agreed to help. Debbie’s Sandwich Shop, C-Town Nutrition and Southern Fried Rabbit all established areas for people to donate canned goods or money to purchase those food items to help with what the students named the project, “Cans for a Cause.”
At the end of the project, before school let out for Thanksgiving break, West Marion took 1,272 canned food items to the Marion County Food Pantry to help provide for families in need.
While working on the project, three students took everything to an entirely different level. Kolby Stringer, Rhett Graham and Eli Smith came up with the idea of “Blessing of Venison.” The guys wanted to share more than just the canned food items. They wanted to donate meat for the families’ tables.
They talked with McCain Meat Processing about helping them with this side of the project and they agreed to package the venison for them. The need of where to store the meat at the pantry came up and the students got a freezer donated to the pantry to put the venison in so it would be kept until needed.
