In the spirit of the holiday season, Cornell College students, faculty and staff have helped to collect school supplies, toiletries, pajamas, stuffed animals, toys and $450 in cash for Pitt County, N.C., schoolchildren hit hard by floods in the wake of Hurricane Floyd.
The materials were shipped courtesy of United Parcel Service and arrived Dec. 6 at the elementary school in Grifton. Many of the donations will be distributed to students after an assembly Dec. 17 before the school closes for a two-week holiday break.
“We’re very thankful and overwhelmed at the support we’ve gotten,” said Jackie Adams, principal of Grifton Elementary School, which has 510 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Adams said half the students’ homes were completely or partially flooded. “Grifton is not an affluent school,” she said. “Even the students not flooded were still affected because they may have friends staying with them.”
Pitt County is the former home of Cornell President Les Garner and his wife, Katrina. Les Garner was president of North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount before coming to Cornell in 1994. He was born in Greenville, where much of his family still resides. Katrina Garner also grew up in Pitt County and remembers athletic rivalries with the Grifton schools.
“Grifton is about the same size as Mount Vernon,” Katrina Garner said. In letters from the Grifton schoolchildren “a lot of kids indicated they really didn’t have any time to react -they escaped with what they had on their backs,” she said.
So Cornell students organized a “Cuddles for Carolina” campaign and along with Mount Vernon’s Washington Elementary School and the United Methodist Church youth group “adopted” the Grifton school. Collection boxes sprouted on campus. Washington students held a bake sale at Cornell. The relief drive netted crayons, pencils, children’s books and assorted school supplies; toothbrushes from Oral B Laboratories in Iowa City, soap and other toiletries; pajamas, robes and 20 pairs of new shoes; stuffed animals; and $450 – including $215 from the bake sale. Cornell women’s tennis Coach Fred Burke gathered more than 350 tennis balls for Grifton to use on classroom chair legs so they won’t scrape on floors that lost carpeting to the flood waters. Additional fund-raising projects are in the works.
The relief campaign could be the start of a long-term relationship. Schoolchildren in Mount Vernon and Grifton have become pen pals. Cornell students might travel to the area for service learning trips or internships at the school.