COASTAL OBSERVER

A pizza party for the homeroom class that collected the most nonperishable food items was only an incentive, not the end goal, for Waccamaw Middle School’s canned food drive that gave 13,302 items to the Baskervill Food Pantry last week.

This year’s donation more than doubled from last year’s 6,058 collected items with help from MK Consulting. 

Since Waccamaw Middle began the food drive in 2021 and collected 3,239 items in total, the number has steadily increased each year. The school collected 3,649 items in 2022 and 4,625 in 2023.

The middle school’s food drive began collecting donations the week prior to Thanksgiving and donated monetary and in-kind donations at the pre-holiday pep rally on Dec. 18.

“I was like, I don’t think I’m going to set a goal because I just think that the goal is continuing to get too high. I don’t know if we could reach that,” principal Ginny Haynes told the students. “I underestimated you guys.”

This year the school partnered with MK Technology, Riverside Pediatrics, Dependable Service Plumbing & Air and Ortho SC to match donations each week.

“You have no idea what your partnership meant to us this year,” Haynes said.

Hannah Wade’s homeroom class brought in the most donations with 1,756 cans and boxes of nonperishable food items.

Michelle Steffen, a physician at Riverside Pediatrics, matched donations for a week. That resulted in a $2,507 monetary donation to the food pantry.

“I wrote [Haynes] and said, ‘count us in,’” she said. “Feeding those less fortunate in the community is incredibly important to us. We were really excited to support that.”

Steffen said that the students’ involvement teaches them character beyond the classroom.

“When we’re teaching the kids to be generous and to think about others when they’re young, it’s going to create a generation of kids who will want to give back as adults,” she said.

Her son, Colin Steffen, is an eighth-grader at the middle school. The chance to get pizza and ice cream sandwiches was mere motivation, he said.

“There’s always the little thing in the back of your mind saying, ‘I’m doing something good.’ Helping other people, you know, using what you have to give back to other people that may not have it,” Colin said.

Haynes agreed, and said the food drive makes the spirit of giving tangible to the students.

“Our kids need to know that here, that not everybody sitting beside them, you know, has food on the table easily,” she said. “Hopefully it’s building their hearts.”

“It has to be,” added Kylie Vaughn, a volunteer on the leadership team with the Baskervill Food Pantry.

Waccamaw Middle’s food drive is “a blessing” that the food pantry looks forward to every year, according to Vaughn.

“This is a drive we talk about all year long,” she said. “It’s one of the biggest that we have just in a single drive that comes into the pantry. It just gets bigger and bigger, and it’s amazing.”

Vaughn said she watched the middle school’s food drive expand each year while her sons were students and she served on the parent-teacher organization.

The drive helps the pantry stock up for the year, she said, and will feed more than 800 households in the community.

“This drive takes a little stress off the pantry,” Vaughn said.