Students Give to the Community

During the month of November students at Bob Jones Academy focused on giving. Students on all levels spent time helping those who have different needs in the local area .
Elementary students worked hard to bring in food in order to be a Thanksgiving blessing to families in need. Each grade level was assigned a food item and given a goal of 100 items. Almost every grade far surpassed that goal, with fifth grade shattering the goal at 416 cans of sweet potatoes! The Thanksgiving food baskets were assembled with the help of the BJU ministerial students and were distributed to families the week before Thanksgiving. What an opportunity to be a blessing to families in our community!
During the week of Nov. 3–7, the middle school students enthusiastically engaged in their annual food drive on behalf of Miracle Hill Children’s Home. The week of homeroom competition featured strategy sessions; collaborative efforts in counting, sorting and scoring; and most of all, generous giving to MHCH. Homerooms earned points by meeting collection goals in a variety of categories from dry and canned goods to paper products and cleaning supplies. Students boxed and weighed the donated items before loading them on a trailer provided by Miracle Hill. The winning classes, 7-4 and 7-1 (led by Mrs. Nelson and Mr. Foster, respectively) traveled to the children’s home where they enjoyed a pizza lunch, a brief tour of one of the cottages, and an opportunity to help unload the truck and to see how MHCH sorts and stores what the middle school contributed. This year, BJA Middle School students gave MHCH over 11,000 items—and the combined weight of those items exceeded 13,000 pounds!
Seventh through twelfth grade students partnered with Molina Healthcare in a community service project to aid a children’s home in Anderson County. Mike Sowers, a former teacher at BJA and now the Community Engagement Coordinator for Molina Healthcare, brought to the students a project to make blankets for the children taken in by the home. The students cut and tied fringe to make blankets with precut pieces of fleece. While the high school students did the bulk of the cutting, the middle school students provided the much-needed assistance with the tying. In what resembled an old-fashioned quilting bee, nearly two dozen students gathered in the middle school resource room and worked their way through about 50 blankets. The students motivated themselves by choosing different patterns on the fleece—but primarily by reminding themselves of the children who would be using those blankets.
Finally, high school students gathered paper goods for Shepherd’s Gate, a ministry of Miracle Hill. The ninth grade class collected paper napkins while the tenth grade class gathered boxes of tissues. Paper towels rolled in with eleventh grade students, and toilet paper came in with twelfth grade students. Overall the high school students brought in enough paper goods to help the ministry of Shepherd’s Gate to get through much of the coming year.