Hamilton schools fill buses with more than 60K pounds of food, goods

District students cram 60,899 pounds of items into 3 vehicles from local food bank.

Hamilton High School student Michael Campbell unloads boxes of food collected by district students for the “Fill that Bus” campaign to aid Fairfield-based Shared Harvest Foodbank. Buses from all over the district met at the Hamilton Freshman School on Friday, Feb. 12, to transfer 60,899 pounds of donated items onto Shared Harvest trucks.

Staff photo by Greg Lynch Hamilton High School student Michael Campbell unloads boxes of food collected by district students for the “Fill that Bus” campaign to aid Fairfield-based Shared Harvest Foodbank. Buses from all over the district met at the Hamilton Freshman School on Friday, Feb. 12, to transfer 60,899 pounds of donated items onto Shared Harvest trucks.

ENLARGE PHOTO

By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer 2:41 AM Saturday, February 13, 2010

HAMILTON — “Fill That Bus” turned to “Fill Those Trucks” on Friday, Feb. 12, as carpentry students from Hamilton High School’s Career Technical Education Center transferred 60,899 pounds of food from 20 school buses into three trucks from Shared Harvest Foodbank.

Despite the frigid temperatures, spirits were soaring in the Freshman School parking lot as the districtwide food drive and Character Education Initiative project exceeded all expectations.

“Isn’t this totally awesome?” exclaimed Zellene Miller, career development coordinator at Hamilton High and one of the organizers of “Fill That Bus.”

“Just thinking about all the compassion that’s being shown ... It’s just awesome!”

The goal was for each of the district’s 15 buildings to collect enough food to fill one school bus, about 88 boxes. Some were filled to overflowing and five schools needed two buses. Drivers reported that a bus from Fillmore Elementary had boxes stacked so high on the seats that they tumbled into the aisles during the journey.

The process began at 7:30 a.m. when Hamilton High School’s Indoor Marching Percussion Ensemble played a marching beat as students loaded the bus. Many of the schools held assemblies or other events.

Ridgeway had a tea party for the high school students who came to collect their boxes to celebrate the end of the food drive.

By 10:30 a.m. at the Freshman School, as buses from the elementaries started to arrive, organizers began to worry that the three Shared Harvest vehicles — a 53-foot semi-trailer, a 24-foot straight truck and a 12-foot box truck — wouldn’t be enough to hold it all, and wondered if they should route the last buses directly to Shared Harvest’s warehouse in Fairfield.

But by noon, as the carpentry students unloaded Ridgeway’s 212 boxes containing 7,565 items of nonperishable food and personal hygiene items, some creative packing allowed a little — albeit very little — room to spare.

'Fill That Bus’ project imparted classroom, community lessons

“It’s a good way to end an exhausting week,” said Hamilton City Schools’ director of transportation Becky Goosey as the 20th bus backed up to the Shared Harvest semitrailer to unload the last boxes from the district’s “Hey Big Blue: Fill That Bus” food drive.

A pair of snow days had been stressful, she said, but everyone present was happy to see such a community effort, including the bus drivers who volunteered their time to transport the food from each district building to the Freshman School.

The “Fill That Bus” project took five months to organize and execute, beginning at an October meeting of the Character Education Initiative committee, when Jim Place, director of social responsibility, brought the idea to the table.

Place borrowed the idea from Beavercreek schools near Dayton, which conducted a food drive they called “Extreme Takeover” to fill a school bus full of food.

“We saw the potential and made it our own,” said Superintendent Janet Baker. “Character Education isn’t a program you can just buy, especially something like this that meets the needs of the community and interests the kids.”

She said that publishers offer character education modules, some of which are in use in Hamilton, but nothing as encompassing as “Fill That Bus.”

“I think the program can mean so much more if it has relevance to the community.”

Hamilton upped the ante in several ways, not just by making it a goal for each building to fill a bus, but also by working it into its award-winning Character Education Initiative, focusing on the trait of compassion.

“It’s about giving from the heart,” said Zellene Miller, who organized the effort at Hamilton High, “about so many people coming together to feed the hungry. We were trying to teach a lesson about giving to others, about giving to people in need.”

But it became more than just a service learning project, but an academic one as well. Before the project kicked off Jan. 4, the first day back from winter break, students took a pre-test on world hunger to gauge what they knew about hunger and hunger issues.

As “Fill the Bus” proceeded, teachers found ways to work those issues into their teaching. Now that it’s over, many students will be writing reflective papers on the experience and what they learned, which also will be evaluated on a post-test, Baker said.

“It gave them leadership opportunities, too, because they couldn’t have done it alone,” Baker said. “It got art classes involved in decorating shopping carts to promote the project and get the community involved.

“I think this has been the best example yet of family, school and community partnership, and what made it a success is the fact that everybody rallied around it,” Baker said. “Everyone pulled together to reach a goal, and the project exceeded all expectations.”

Everyone involved in Friday’s truck-loading finale had anecdotes to tell, including one about a girl who walked into an elementary school office with two pennies she found to see how many cans of food that would buy. Another brought in the money the Tooth Fairy left under her pillow.

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