By Katrina Grant
The Seneca High School Student council has been organizing a toy drive for several organizations in the Burlington County area. Together with the Indian Mills Middle School, Olsen Middle School and Cranberry Pines School, toys are cleaned and organized for the drive.
There are 30 students from the student council working on the drive, and the chairs for the committee are Shawn Tuman and Ryan Kane. Shawnee High School used to run the drive, but Seneca has taken it over and has been doing it for the past nine years.
“The other schools will collect clean, and categorize the toys,” Erica Maira, guidance counselor at Seneca and faculty member who heads the toy drive, said. “Then they will bag them up and bring them over to us.”
The students will then go through the bags, make sure all the toys are clean and not broken and re-organize them for the drive.
“The students stay after, clean them, make sure they’re not broken and put them in bags,” Maira said.
The toy drive will take place on Dec. 5 in the cafeteria of the high school.
“The organizations are able to come that day and pick up the toys,” Maira said. “The places that are coming are the ARC of Burlington County, BCAP/Headstart, Christian Caring Center in Browns Mills, the King’s New Life Assembly of God and the Dudley Elementary School in Camden. I’ve tried to contact other places, but these are the main ones. Most of the other organizations are umbrellaed under these.”
The student council also has another charity drive in January where it raises money for state charities. Maira says that she feels that the toy drive and the fund raiser in January are the students’ favorites.
“I think this one of the favorites,” Maira said. “For me, this re-centers me. It shows me what is really important in life. I think it’s really cool too, that instead of throwing the toys away, people donate them so they can be cleaned and given to other children. It gives them a new life for the children. It’s awesome.”
“This is exciting for us because we’ve never had it covered before,” Maira said.
If you would like to donate to the toy drive you can drop any toys off at Seneca High School’s main office by Dec. 3.
