Crescent View Middle School makes Christmas deliveries

Crescent View Middle School’s 60 student council members decked out a school bus for the holidays and loaded 3,400 pounds of donated food, more than $9,000 in toys, clothes and cash, and 260 handmade quilts to deliver to charities students selected as part of a school-wide service project called “Vikings Giving Back” on the morning of Dec. 12.

“Every student is placed on a team,” Assistant Principal Stacy Kurtzhals said. “It’s kind of like we have a school within our school.”

Each team was able to choose the charity of its choice to donate to. However, all grades participated in a food drive which benefitted the Indian Walk-In Center in downtown Salt Lake. The Indian Walk-In Center is a non-profit agency dedicated to providing services to the Indian population in Utah.

Crescent View competed with Union Middle School to make the food drive more of a challenge and increase the motivation of students in both schools.

“We ended up tying with Union, but it’s okay because it was all for bragging rights anyway,” Kurtzhals said. “It was just a way to get everyone involved.”

Ninth-graders were very inspired and motivated to help children after their initial “Day of Service” at the James R. Russell Center, a Head Start facility in Rose Park, in mid-October.

“This year, instead of doing Sub-for-Santa, they wanted to really focus on the kids in the Head Start program and give back to them,” Kurtzhals said. “So this was very much sparked by our own students’ interactions with the Head Start kids.”

Along with the Head Start charity, another team chose Wounded Warriors, whose mission is to honor and empower service men and women wounded in the line of duty. The eighth grade teams focused on Primary Children’s Education Center and seventh grade teams collected money for KSL’s ‘Quarters For Christmas’ which buys shoes and clothing for children at Christmas.

Students were able to collect all of these donations by going to neighbors and friends for support. They also went to their dentists’ offices to collect items like toothbrushes and toothpaste.

“We had one student bring in 250 handmade quilts that she and her mom had made,” Kurtzhals said. “It was a really student-driven effort.”

The student council was selected to make the deliveries because of all the hard work they put into the fundraiser.

“Our student council really does a lot of work for projects like these,” Kurtzhals said. “They were the ones here in the mornings collecting the food and counting it all up. So making the deliveries was kind of their reward for the service and extra time they put in to get all of this together.”

Total donations brought in after two weeks were $9,108.00 worth of goods and cash and 3,392 pounds of food.

“Our community and kids are just fantastic; that’s what it comes down to,” Kurtzhals said.