For the fourth year in a row, the Shepherdstown Rotary Club will be providing needy Jefferson County elementary school children with backpacks filled with school supplies when classes resume for the fall.
The backpacks will go to children at four elementary schools: T.A. Lowery, North Jefferson, Ranson, and Blue Ridge—and the Shepherdstown Day Care Center.
The four schools are all Title I schools, which means more than 40% of their students come from low-income families. The Shepherdstown Day Care Center also serves low-income households. The schools require families to purchase the supplies contained in the backpacks but there are always families that are hard-pressed to do so.
The Rotary Club works closely with administrators at the schools and Day Care Center to ensure that the supplies will go to children from families most in need, and the supplies are ordered from lists provided by each institution.
This year, a total of 160 backpacks are being distributed. Each institution will get backpacks with grade-specific supplies for at least 30 children in grades 1 through 3, and each backpack will contain up to 23 supply items.
The total cost of this year’s backpacks and supplies is $5,200. The Shepherdstown Rotary Club has covered $3,000 of the cost with its own funds. Another $1,100 has been contributed by Lift Global, a secular nonprofit charitable organization created by Shepherdstown’s Covenant Church, and the rest has been covered by contributions from individual Rotary Club members.
The backpacks and supplies have been obtained from Blusource, a Guthrie, OK, firm that specializes in wholesaling school supplies. Bluesource has contributed to the project by covering the shipping cost of all these materials.
The Shepherdstown Community Club generously allows its building to be used as the staging area for these materials, and 26 Rotarians, family members, and members of the community gathered there on Saturday, August 9, to place the supplies in the backpacks and organize them for delivery. The accompanying photo shows most of this group outside the Community Club building.
Teams of Rotarians will deliver the finished backpacks to the schools and the Day Care Center on August 19, the day after the schools come back into session.
The project is coordinated by Walt Eifert, of the Shepherdstown Rotary Club’s Vocational Service Committee. Much of the work is done by Kim Eifert, a retired Berkeley County teacher, who handles the contacts with the schools and the Day Care Center, and who also organizes the staging of supplies.