Box Tops for Education

jds1970:

Our PTO is always looking for community involvement ideas for the school to participate in.  We've done food drives, clothing drives, book drives, collecting movies for a children's hospital.  What are some other more creative ideas your schools have tried?

my son startted a happy meal toy drive for local childrens hospital. collected all the happy meal/burger king/wendys etc... toys that most kids r too old for but still want their folks to buy them.

There is a young boy in our community that came up with the idea to do "Pennies for Pets".  Im not sure of the details but it is to help the animal shelter here in our community and has been a very successful program so far.  Pets seem to be forgotten so it is so nice to see a young man taking part in the protection of these forgotten little creatures.

We've done L.I. Cares (a local food bank for the area), we found out that food stamps does not cover toilet paper.  Our local feeding ministry gives out when its available one roll per family per week (sometimes longer).  We do a paper drive for our food bank now, whenever we can.    We did a sock drive for Ten purple socks for the homeless (its on the web .org I believe).  We do a coat drive in the fall with the coats cleaning being donated by a local dry cleaner and its given out to the local homeless.   We've collected toiletries from hotels that families have stayed at and given them to our food bank.   We have a house for teenage mothers in our area and we do a drive for them too (such as baby supplies and diapers, etc).

We've done your ideas too.  Try the paper drive.  It is an eye opening experience.  I tried in my family to use one roll for one week..... wasn't pretty! 

Our school participated in the "Protect an Acre" project.  We sold rainforest themed t-shirts to help protect acres of Amazon  Rainforest!  It was a big hit and we saved over 25 acres of Amazon Rainforest.  I know this is not really a Community project, yet still a very important lesson on Conservation to teach our students!

We adopted a Navy Warship on deployment and sent cards, magazines, candies, and personal items like tissues, baby wipes, deodarants and toothpaste.   In exchange, the sailors sent us back photos of where they were sailing and info that made teaching history and geography a little more exciting for the kids.

We also raised money for the Haitian earthquake this year.