Makayla Barkley, center, helps organize cans of food collected by students at East Ridge Elementary School during the culmination of a two-week food drive.

For the past two weeks, students at East Ridge Elementary School have been bringing canned goods and non-perishable items to school to help their less fortunate neighbors during the Thanksgiving holidays.

Michelle Larson, Parent Volunteer Coordinator for the school, said this is the third year that students have partnered with the local Masonic Lodge to give a helping hand to others.

“Last year we had about 1,900 cans,” Larson said. “This year, when it’s all over with, we will have collected over 3,000 cans.”

Larson said about 75 percent of the students at the Title I school have contributed food items. There was some incentive for participation, she said.

“We’re having a little competition,” Larson said. “The class that collects the most items will get a pizza party, complete with cupcakes.”

Another incentive for participating, Larson said, was the fact that any student contributing gets a free ticket to the school’s Winter Ball, slated for Dec. 9.

Makayla Barkley, a fifth-grader, has been shoulder to shoulder with Larson throughout the food drive. She has voluntarily been at school just after 7:30 a.m. to help out “with most anything,” Larson said.

“I think it’s wonderful that people will get the food and the water that they need,” Makayla said as she put beans into a box in a small office jammed with foodstuffs off the main lobby of the school.

Late Friday afternoon, Larson contacted East Ridge News Online and said that the school children collected 3,851 cans of food for the less fortunate. And Mrs. Davis’s third-grade class got the pizza party by collecting the most cans (556) of any single class.

At about 10:30 a.m., Pete Floyd, a Past Master of Masonic Lodge 755, showed up with his pickup truck. A half-dozen fellow Masons began arriving with trucks, vans and two-wheelers to load up the haul and take it back to the lodge on Ringgold Road.

Floyd said he’s been with the lodge for 15 years and the food drive was going on at that time. The Masons are distributing the food to needy families during Thanksgiving, he said, because so many organizations do similar food drives during Christmas. Floyd said the Masons help out with food to hungry people throughout the entire year.

This Thanksgiving, about 30 families have been identified thus far as needing some help. Floyd said that list will grow in coming days.

“We (the Masonic Lodge) will go out and buy hams,” he said. “We are getting hams because some families don’t have the refrigeration for turkey.”

Floyd’s son, Matthew, a school bus driver and fellow Mason in the lodge with his father, was one of the younger men helping out on Friday. He packed a paneled van full of boxes of canned goods and trucked down to Lodge 755, only a few blocks away.

As he was unloading the boxes inside the lodge, he paused to tell this story.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time with my dad,” Matt Floyd said. “I remember taking a box full of food in and took a couple dozen eggs off the top of the box.

“These kids said, ‘you even brought eggs?’ They were so happy they were getting something as simple as eggs. It was like Christmas morning because the kids were going to be able to eat eggs.

“These people really appreciate what we do,” he said.

Joe Swaney, a member of Masonic Lodge 755, loads canned goods on a cart, while Michelle Larson, right, sorts through boxes of food with students, Friday morning at East Ridge Elementary.

And it’s not only people that benefited from the food drive; pet food was also collected, Larson said.

Andrea Dillard from East Ridge Animal Services came by and hauled away a cart full of dog and cat food. Larson said Dillard was “very appreciative.”

Contributed photo – Mrs. Davis’s third-grade class collected 556 cans of food and got a pizza party for their efforts.