Officials recognize school donations

PORTALES — Pencils, paper, glue and erasers. Notebooks, binders, crayons and calculators — the school district has “boxes and boxes and boxes” of these items thanks to the United Way of Eastern New Mexico, said Portales Municipal Schools administrative assistant Julie Miller.

With support of the community and local businesses, UWENM received 5,424 items during its day long “Stuff the Bus” promotion Aug. 5 outside Portales’ Wal-Mart. It was recognized accordingly at the city’s board of education meeting Monday night.

“We just asked shoppers to give a little extra,” said UWENM Executive Director Erinn Burch, noting the collection’s productive coincidence with tax-free weekend. “When you hit all the right notes it usually works. This year we had great volunteer participation, we reached out to our business friends and we were really pushing it very well online.”

Along with an identical promotion at several locations in Clovis, this year’s haul came close to 18,000 school supply items, Burch said. That’s a dramatic improvement from combined collections of 7,900 items last year and 11,000 items in 2015.

This year’s collections were assisted by Altrusa and area businesses, Burch said.

In the past seven or so years of the annual promotion, this year’s haul compares most closely with 2014, when the two communities gave almost 21,000 items of assorted school goods.

The effort originated around 2010, about the time “that as a board, as an organization we started to identify that supporting education in our community was an ideal leverage point for changing communities — for helping long-term growth in our community and family stability,” Burch said.

“It raises the awareness of how important education is — it reminds us all of that,” she said. “I want every child to feel that joy of going back to school ... teachers matter. Education matters. And hopefully this one thing along with other things that we do and everybody as a community does, that there’s a build-up effect.”