It’ hard – and sad – to believe, but it’s already time to get ready to go back to school. Even when you’ve been out of school for years, this time of year is always hard to deal with – shorter days, cooler temperatures, the general bummer of summer ending.
But for those actually going back to school, this is an important time. The new school year often demands new supplies, and for a lot of families that can be a hardship – especially if that family has three, four, five kids in school.
Thanks to Rundlett Middle School’s Ready to Learn Fair, held at the school this Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., all students throughout the Concord School District will have the chance to get everything they need for the new school year.
The program, in its third year now, helps provide supplies like backpacks, notebooks, pencils, crayons and other classroom utensils, as well as hygiene packs and even services like haircuts, tooth exams, eye exams and physicals.
The program has been consistently providing all of these resources for the past two years, but this year will be the first to feature the vision test by Visionworks, a physical (with a voucher) and gym bags for middle and high school students.
This is also the first year the fair will be broken up into age groups, said Caroline Keane, one of the coordinators of the program.
“We realized that younger kids don’t need things like binders, but they do need crayons,” she said. The age groups will help ensure each student gets the things he or she needs the most and nothing goes to waste.
Also new this year is the sheer volume of everything. In the first year, 65 filled backpacks went out the door. Last year it was 220. This year they’ve purchased 350 and they expect them all to find good homes.
“It’s amazing how much support we get from the business community,” Keane said. And it’s not just private businesses chipping in – the program also received $2,200 in grants, so that combined with donations and fundraising brought the group to its $5,000 goal for the first time.
This means more backpacks, the gym bags for the older kids, full-size hygiene kits instead of mini ones, and all of the other important resources the Ready to Learn Fair provides.
Keane loves the enthusiasm the community has for the program, and doesn’t see it slowing down.
“I think each year as we go forward and the word gets out there, it gets easier and easier to fundraise,” she said.
For more info, go to facebook.com/ReadyToLearnFair.
