The district’s four schools had a friendly competition against one another, and this year, Seneca High School came out on top.
The Lenape Regional High School District recently finished its eighth year of participating in the Give to Goodwill Competition, with what district officials describe as an astounding 79,204 pounds of clothing collected for donation.
Students, teachers, staff and family members at each district school were asked to bring in gently used clothing and accessories to be collected and donated to Goodwill.
The schools competed against each other, hoping to out-donate the reigning Give to Goodwill champion, Cherokee High School.
This year, Seneca High School came out on top.
“Each day, the students in the LRHSD amaze and inspire me. We are very fortunate to have staff who enjoy motivating our teens to volunteer. Collecting donations for the Goodwill is one way every teen can participate in helping our community,” LRHSD Superintendent of Schools Carol Birnbohm said.
The competition kicked off on Monday, Sept. 24 and ended on Tuesday, Nov. 13, giving students more than a month to make donations.
The items were collected and then weighed. The school with the most pounds per student was named the winner of the contest.
This standard of measure kept the competition fair due to the different populations at each school.
To maintain interest in the competition, the district included a bar graph of real-time standings on each school website homepage.
Participants could keep track of their competitors and know how many pounds of donations their school needed to pull ahead.
When the competition concluded, the LRHSD collected 76,204 pound of donations to give to Goodwill, which equaled 3,314 bags of clothing.
Seneca High School secured its first-place finish in the competition by collecting 18.21 pounds of clothing per student with a total of 20,392 pounds.
Cherokee High School came in second place collecting 14.92 pounds per student with a total of 31,822 pounds overall, followed by Shawnee with 11.32 pounds per student and 17,964 pounds overall, and then Lenape with 3.21 pounds per student and a total of 6,026 pounds overall.
The LRHSD’s eight-year total as a participant in the competition is now 418,525 pounds.
Proceeds from the sale of donated items fund Goodwill’s job training programs and career services that help local residents with disabilities and disadvantages get to work.
“We are incredibly grateful to the Lenape Regional School District for partnering with us in this friendly clothing drive competition,” Goodwill President and CEO Mark B. Boyd said. “This community service project teaches students the importance of recycling and reusing community resources while helping fund Goodwill’s job training programs that help those faced with barriers to employment to get to work.”
