As the new school year began, the Shepherdstown Rotary Club provided 167 needy Jefferson County elementary school children with backpacks filled with school supplies.
The backpacks went 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 worked closely with administrators at the schools and Day Care Center to ensure that the backpacks would go to children from families most in need, and the supplies were ordered from lists supplied by each institution.
Each institution got backpacks with grade-specific supplies for at least 30 children in grades 1 through 3, and each backpack contained up to 23 supply items. Blue Ridge Elementary got an extra 17 backpacks.
The total cost of the backpacks and supplies was $4,781. The Shepherdstown Rotary Club covered $3,000 of the cost with its own funds. Another $1,150 was contributed by Lift Global, a new secular nonprofit charitable organization just created by Shepherdstown’s Covenant Church, and the remaining $631 was contributed by individual Rotary Club members.
The backpacks and supplies were obtained from Blusource, a Guthrie, OK, firm that specializes in wholesaling school supplies. In this case, Bluesource contributed to the project by covering the $442 shipping cost of these materials itself.
In all, the shipment of backpacks and supplies from Bluesource weighed three-quarters of a ton. The Shepherdstown Community Club generously allowed its building to be used as the staging area for these materials, and more than 30 Rotarians, family members, and members of the community gathered there on Saturday, August 18, 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 delivered the finished backpacks to the schools and the Day Care Center on August 20.
The project was spearheaded by the Walt Eifert, of the Shepherdstown Rotary Club’s Vocational Service Committee. Much of the work was done by Kim Eifert, a retired Berkeley County teacher, who handled the contacts with the schools and the Day Care Center, and who also organized the staging of supplies.
