For three weeks in August, my church was running a pencil drive, asking the members to donate pencils, erasers, and crayons. They wanted them for a program I highly support: donating writing supplies to lower income elementary schools to take home to do their homework. The church member in charge of the drive is a retired teacher and the students love her. They asked her when the nice church people were going to give them pencils again.
I donated to the drive. A little over a year ago, I thought it would be cool to have pencils designed for various different holiday. I ended up with 570 pencils. I used two and one was a dud, the only dud I found, but they just weren’t the quality I was looking for. I talked to the woman hosting the pencil drive and explained the 567 remaining pencils weren’t as high a quality as she preferred. The moment she heard they were holiday themed, however, she excitedly told me she would take them, that the children would love them.
I wasn’t the only one donating pencils. There was a whole basket full of them. I saw two boxes of 600 pencils each and another box of 1,250. They were separated out last week by volunteers and they had enough for 588 bags to distribute to the students. They were even able to donate over a thousand to another school.
As for the holiday pencils, she told me that she had separated those out and had given them directly to the front office. The teachers will be able to go in and collect the pencils for the relevant holiday and pass them out as prizes. I hope the children like the pencils. It’s a wonderful way to help out the community.
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