January 10, 2012

Lake Ridge Academy Students Support Community Outreach

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This past Saturday, Lake Ridge Academy students arrived at the Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church to decorate the hall, set the dining tables and serve dinner for the annual Three Kings Dinner. For over 30 years Lake Ridge Academy students have participated in the annual holiday project. Starting after Thanksgiving and running until winter break, our K-12 students collect clothing, canned goods, and coins. Together with Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, they invited families from the community to come enjoy the dinner prepared by the church and served by our students. Each child from the community who registered received a bag of gifts presented to them by the “Three Kings” and each family took home four bags of groceries.

The day before winter break the upper school students are paired with lower school students and together they make placemats, cards, candy bags and count and roll the coins. This year the total coins collected amounted to over $1,500.00! The money was used to purchase the food for the Three Kings Dinner, pay the Food Pantry's outstanding Food CoOp balance and the remainder was put in the Food Pantry account to help purchase perishable food items for the upcoming months. The day before the event Lake Ridge Academy 8th graders went to the church to decorate and set out all of the crafts the students had made including placemats. Each year the middle school students go to Wal-Mart to buy and wrap the gifts selected for children on the church’s list. Prior to the celebration, the upper school students spend the day at the church sorting the food, clothing, and gifts and prepare for the dinner.

This year the Lake Ridge Academy Upper School house challenge was to collect 2,500 cans each. Not only did each house do that but between them all they collected over 11,000 cans! The Lake Ridge Academy Upper School also has an advisory competition around the can collection. This year’s house can award with 3,992 cans goes to Dante House. The Golden Soup Can Award, given to the individual advisory with the most cans collected, went to Dr. Mozumdar's advisory for the 8th year in a row bringing in 1,879 cans! Mr. Wright's advisory took second place winning the Silver Tuna Fish Can with 943 cans, and Mr. Davis' advisory came in third winning the Plastic Lid with 906 cans.

After dinner, three adults played the roles of the kings and distributed the gifts to the children. One of the three kings was a member of the church and the other two kings were played by Middle school Social Studies teacher, Mr. Lloyd Wakefield and Spanish, French, and Italian upper school teacher, Sr. Catanese.

The collections from the project will fill the church’s food pantry for several months. Congratulations and thank you to all of the students for their hard work and good will!