Ancient Lakes students collect hats, gloves
From left: Teacher Kayla Hoffer and her second-grade highly-capable class of Charlie McCormick, Emma Evens and Bella Wall, along with Kids Hope’s resident fur buddy Valor, show off the hats, gloves and scarves the students collected in the space of a month.
JOEL MARTIN/COLUMBIA BASIN HERALD
QUINCY — Three students at Ancient Lakes Elementary School in Quincy have made winter a little warmer for some folks.
“(They collected) 97 pairs of gloves, 93 hats and eight scarves,” said teacher Kayla Hoffer.
The three girls — Emma Evens, Bella Wall and Charlie McCormick — makes up Hoffer’s Highly-Capable second-grade class, and they started collecting winter clothing Nov. 4, they said. They were gathered Tuesday in Hoffer’s classroom with Elisa Adolphsen and Trisha Glenn from Kids Hope and Det. Jacob Fisher with the Grant County Sheriff’s Office to turn over the trove to Kids Hope. Valor, the four-legged confidant from Kids Hope, was also there.
“We’ve been getting donations from our school and now we’re going to give them to the community,” Emma said.
The students were looking for a project to take on and the subject of a coat drive came up, Hoffer wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald. But once they realized how many other organizations were collecting coats, they shifted gears and looked at hats and gloves, because even with a coat on, heads and hands get cold.
“(The hats and gloves) are going to go to the Children's Advocacy Center (which is) Kids Hope,” Adolphsen said. “We serve both Grant and Adams Counties and we’re co-located with New Hope, so if there are families in need from the other side, we’ll make sure they get some as well.”
“They also work very closely with (Child Protective Services), so they’ll have those families in contact with them as well,” Fisher said.
According to Hoffer, the vast majority of the work was done by the students.
“They have designed and planned everything with very little help from me,” she wrote. “I'm simply their little worker bee with access to the computer.”
The students were happy to see their efforts do some good, but just handing them over in a box wasn’t their preferred method of distribution, Charlie said.
“Bella said she wanted to stand in the back of a truck and throw gloves out,” she said.
The trio was already thinking about what kind of a project to take on after the winter break is over. Emma thought they might try picking up garbage in the spring.
“Maybe we could get the whole school to do it on Earth Day,” she said.