Parent Chaperones and 2nd graders from Ezra Academy get ready to fill their shopping carts with groceries for the JFS Food Pantry.
Harriet Friedman sent in this write-up and these photos about recent food-drive activity benefiting the Jewish Family Services food pantry on Whalley Ave.
At 8:30 am Tuesday morning, 24 second-graders from Ezra Academy, eight parent chaperones and two teachers descended upon New Haven’s Stop and Shop supermarket with $800 to spend and only 45 minutes in which to fill their shopping carts.
It was part two of a three-part charity, or Tzedakah project, which began by selling and distributing bagel breakfasts to their cohorts, parents, teachers and administrative staff at Ezra Academy. The profit margin of the breakfast sale was very high as the food was mostly donated by Meredith Abel Caterers and by parents. Part three of the Tzedakah project was to use the money to fill the JFS Food Pantry on Whalley Ave. True to the spirit of the occasion, Stop and Shop added a gift card to the total on behalf of the store.
The 2nd graders posed after shopping holding up their very long grocery sales slips. They had 0 to spend in 45 minutes and filled up 8 carts with needed hot cereals, soups, pastas and other items recommended by Sandy from the JFS Food Pantry.
It wasn’t easy to fill up the shopping carts because the second-graders were instructed to look for healthy foods and good values. No candy made it into the carts but wacky spirals and ear-flap looking pasta bits were welcomed. Shopping carts of hot cereals, hearty soups, pasta, beans and sauce and other products yielded very long register tapes and very many bags to deliver down the road to the Food Pantry. This was not the first time the children (nearly a thrid of whom live in Westville) had been to JFS; as kindergarteners, the children had donated a mountain of gently used toys and books to the Pantry.
The Food Pantry shelves had a lot of vacancies before the 2nd graders stocked the shelves with their purchases.
Inside the small building, JFS Food Pantry coordinator Sandy applauded the efforts of the second graders and the real work began: weighing the dozens of bags of groceries stocking the shelves. The shelves looked pretty bare at 9:30 am; but by 10:30 a.m. the Pantry was looking good.
Back at Ezra, the kids tallied the long list of weights per bag of food. There was a collective cheer at the total: 680 lbs of food — enough to supplement the diets of 78 people for a month.
Sandy was grateful for the significant contribution of the 24 7- and 8‑year-olds in Ezra’s second grade. It is sobering, though, to recognize that more, much more, is needed to meet the needs of the food pantry’s clientele through the winter months.
Back at Ezra Academy, the students added up the weight of their dozens of grocery bags. It was a Tzedakah project and math lesson too!