R. Roger Rowe is ‘Kind to the Core’ this holiday season!

Usually when one thinks of school pride and competition our mind goes to the sound of screeching shoes on the gym’s wood floor, the swish of the basket and the sound of the buzzer. I see in my mind the goalie that dives to make the amazing save or the volleyball player who jumps high and spikes the ball straight down. We are used to competition in school and know that familiar taste of school pride that comes with victory.

This holiday season, I have experienced a new type of school pride resulting from competition. Our school adopted a “Kind to the Core” slogan this year and our student body recently got together and brainstormed ideas on how to become more “kind to the core.” Together, we decided that collecting cans from our school families and donating them to the San Diego Food Bank would be a fun and meaningful opportunity for not only the student body, but also our community.

We announced our drive and made posters to get our students excited. We asked students to bring as many cans they could to their first period classroom. From there, the student council went from room to room collecting the donated cans. After the first few days, we had the idea of a competition with a 1st place prize to increase donations. To get more cans, we needed a prize for the students to look forward to, so we decided to promise the winning class In-N-Out burgers. After this announcement, our average canned food donation raised dramatically.

Impressive bar charts were hung in the hallways to clearly show which class had the lead. At the end of the week, we tallied up the total cans collected. We counted over 3,000 cans! Mrs. Schnyder’s class came in first place with around 800 cans. This was very eye opening to the student council to see how much fun we could have with a competition to be kind. This week-long, fairly simple competition produced thousands of meals for the needy people in our community. Not only did the results impress our student body, but it impressed the San Diego Food Bank, as well. The Food Bank told us that we had donated more cans of food than they had ever seen from a school. That was a great moment of school pride for me. In sports there is always a winner and loser as the champion brings home the trophy and pride to the school. Our trophy in this experience was knowing the impact we had on the community with just one week of focusing our efforts in service. Everyone came out a winner.

We hope our school triggers a chain reaction of the same!