Boxes of gloves, hats and scarves were collected by Thomas Jefferson Middle School students. Photo by Eoin Cantwell
The students in Mrs. Byron’s and Mrs. Kirsch’s TA [home room], at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, completed their IB community project by doing a gloves, hat, and scarf drive. The purpose was to provide families in need with warm clothes. El Niño storm system was supposed to happen in the 2015-16 winter which guaranteed a lot of snow and cold weather. Our TA wanted to ensure that everyone would be warm and safe throughout the long, cold winter. One sixth grader who was helping us, Javell Edge, said, “This is a wonderful opportunity to collect items from my church to support our school and the community.”
TJ middle school has a variety of different financial situations throughout the school and we knew that some families might need some extra support throughout the cold season. We researched the demographics of our school and discovered that about 45 percent of students at Jefferson are on free/reduced lunch. Jefferson Middle School has the second highest percent of students with lunch benefits out of all the middle schools in Arlington. We wanted to be sure that as many Jefferson families as possible could be warm and safe during the long winter.
To do our project, first we placed posters around the school and presented our project to school via the morning announcements. Then we went around to individual TA’s and promoted our project. Within a week, multiple TA’s started bringing in warm clothes. We collected winter clothes from January to March. The items that were collected were washed and brought down to the Jefferson closet. At the end, we tallied up the clothes and found out that Ms. Holbert and Ms. Banach’s TA’s were winning.
We gave donuts as promised to both TA’s and then took the newest clothes to the Jefferson closet. The Jefferson closet is a storage place for clothes to give to Jefferson families. We put one final announcement on the TV. We told the school our winners and thanked all the TA’s that brought in clothes. We had collected over 100 items in all!
Our homeroom really hopes that we accomplished our project goals and provided warm winter clothes for our school and community for years to come.