The Lafayette Elementary student council had a new idea this year while planning their annual food drive for the White Center Food Bank. They held a competition to see which class could collect the most items and kept track of the donations by teacher on a bulletin board in the front lobby. The donations quickly filled the collection barrel and started to fill the school's front lobby. All of the classes participated, but two classes led the competition: Ms. Rollin's class collected the most items (251) and Mr. Beal's class (203) came in second place. Over 2100 items total were collected school-wide. Last week the White Center Food Bank team had to make two van trips to transport all of the collected food down to their facility in White Center.

Lafayette's student council sponsors two community service projects a year--one in winter and one in spring. James Morrison, Macy Crooks and Shelby Walker (in the photo) were the student council officers in charge of promoting the drive, keeping track of how many items were brought in, and updating a bulletin board daily to monitor our success. A huge thank you to these student leaders, Mimi Armistead (staff lead for Lafayette's student council) and to all the generous Lafayette families who donated food.

Since this effort was so successful, Lafayette is going to continue collecting food for the White Center Food Bank (with a goal of a barrel a month) for the rest of the school year.

Lafayette Elementary is a Seattle Public School located at 2645 California Ave. S.W. in West Seattle. For more information about Lafayette or their ongoing partnership with the White Center Food Bank, please contact Virginia Turner at 252-9500. For more information about White Center Food Bank, visit www.whitecenterfoodbank.org.