Montgomery County Public School officials said they collected more than 9,000 pounds of recycled school supplies to donate to needy students both inside the county and as far away as Iraq during the 2007 Drive for Supplies.
Organizers asked students to donate items they found while cleaning out their desks, lockers and backpacks at the end of the school year. Salvaged supplies include notebooks, binders, pencils, erasers, crayons, glue, scissors, chalk, calculators and lunch boxes. Karen Crawford, MCPS coordinator of student affairs, was disappointed that only eight charity groups showed up this year to take advantage of the donated supplies. She estimated that 15 groups had benefited from the 2006 drive.
According to Crawford, some of the beneficiaries from this year’s drive were the Chinese American Parent and Student Association, the YMCA of Silver Spring and a refugee program sponsored by Church of the Ascension. Also, the father of an MCPS graduate who is stationed in Iraq collected some items to be shipped to schoolchildren in Iraq’s Anbar province. Crawford said local groups benefit from the drive, too.
“I can remember one organization from the Takoma Park area, you would have thought it was like Christmas for those kids to get a Baggie full of broken crayons,” Crawford said. “I think we tend to forget that there’s need in Montgomery County.”
