YATES CENTER ? As the mother of two school-aged children, Shannon Culver is well aware of the stress parents face when getting their youngsters ready for the upcoming school year.
It was a brief conversation with a fellow parent last year that got Culver to thinking: perhaps the community could step forward to ease the burden, at least a little, by helping cover the costs of school supplies ? pens, paper, binders, notebooks, scissors, etc.
?It always broke my heart to see kids show up at the start of the school year with nothing,? she said.
But as busy parents do, Culver also put the thought on a back burner ?and kind of forgot about it,? she said. ?I figured there?s plenty of time to get something together before school starts. It never dawned on me that I needed to start much earlier.?
That changed in late spring ? about the time when school dismissed for the summer ? when Culver decided to give the school supply drive her full attention.
Shannon Culver
Since then, residents, businesses and others in the community helped gather roughly $4,000, enough to buy supplies for all 420 or so K-12 students this year for school district 366.
?It was just a tremendous response,? Culver told the Register in a recent telephone interview. ?We had a lot of people, and a lot of businesses, step forward. I?ve always been so proud of our little community. When it comes to children, everybody always seems to step up.?
The drive was so successful that Culver was able to expand it to include all 130 high-schoolers.
?Originally, we weren?t going to have enough money,? she said. ?But when somebody said, ?Gee, wouldn?t it be nice to help the high school parents, too, we knew we couldn?t just stop.?
That meant raising more than $1,000 in the past week or so to ensure the additional school supplies were available before the start of classes Aug. 19.
That threshold was met earlier this week.
Culver noted there may be some specialty items that students, particularly in high school, may still need to get.
