Renno Colors Hair for Food Drive Win
January 9, 2019
Social Studies teacher Tom Renno dyed his hair with red and white glittery swirls the day before winter break as a reward to his 5th period students who donated over 3,500 cans during the annual campus food drive.
The annual campus drive for the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano Counties began on December 3 and ended on December 19. The drive was formatted as a competition between 5th period classes in an effort to inspire donations.
Instead of competing head to head in brackets as they did last year, each class was simply given a goal based on number of students. According to associated student body commissioner of tech junior Luke VandenBerghe, the Leadership class made this change in order to “encourage classes to reach a goal rather than to beat other classes…”
Leadership officers visited classrooms several days each week to collect cash, coins, and cans. Each dollar contributed counted as 3 cans in the competition tally. If a class reached 1,000 cans, they won candy, at 1,500 cans they won baked goods, and at 2,000 cans they won sundaes. The class with the highest overall total and the class with the highest student to can ratio won a pizza party. The overall goal for the school was 50,000 cans.
Although technically a “canned food drive,” students were encouraged to bring in money instead of cans. “The Contra Costa food bank prefers monetary donations because they are able to spend the money on whatever they feel is necessary so I like that more people bring money than cans but both are awesome,” said senior class vice president Hillary Weaver.
The final amount of money donated was equivalent to 40,454 cans. According to Weaver, “I think we didn’t reach the goal because this year we are missing a few teachers that would usually help and donate a ton. Like Mr. Petreas, Mrs. Herzig, Mr. Ingersoll and Mrs. Powell.”
“I feel like [the drive is] 1 of our biggest successes as a leadership class it’s 1 of the things that raises the most money for charity that we do, it’s definitely 1 of our biggest events and we put a lot of work into it,” said VandenBerghe.
