School leaders and members of the community are partnering to ensure all students on one Sherman campus have a merry Christmas. Volunteers at Sherman Independent School District’s Jefferson Learning Center came together Friday for the school’s blessing bag distribution.
The program has been ongoing at the district’s alternative school program for more than a decade. Each year, volunteers donate items that will ranging from Chapstick to blankets as school lets out for the Christmas break.
“One of my fundamental beliefs is that every student deserves to be treated with dignity, and they deserve to feel like somebody cares about them at Christmas,” Principal Jim May said.
While May has been working with Sherman ISD’s alternative program for nine years, he said the blessing bag program was already in place when he arrived. He has continued the program due to the need many students at the school have.
“It was a little bit smaller program back then, but basically the philosophy behind it is a lot of our kids are going to be struggling financially, socially, family-wise — all of those things,” he said. “We have homeless kids. We’ve got teen parents and all of those situations that just make life harder.”
Each year, the school puts out a request to community partners to see what can be donated to the students. In recent years, the donations have been to the point that every student can receive a bag.
“The people that donate generally have an idea of what we do here and are more than willing to help in any way that they can,” he said. “Our community support is tremendous for what we are doing here because they know these kids do matter. If we can help them find some success now, they are going to carry that success over into adulthood.”
Among the community partners this year was Legacy Bible Church, who has volunteered within the district for more than a decade. The church traditionally has organized the food bag program that sees more than 550 bags of food given out across four campuses each week.
In recent years, more than a half-dozen students from the school have volunteered to assemble the bags and distribute them. Through this effort, volunteers became more acquainted with the campus and learned about the need many of the students’ face.
“We’ve gotten to know these students kind of on a first-hand basis when they come each week and spend an hour, hour and a half, with us packing the food sacks and sending them off to schools, Deacon Jim Lugannani said.
The church donated the bags that were used for this year’s program and also included a few snacks for the students to enjoy over the holiday.
“Some of them (Jefferson students) have a pretty tough life,” Lugannani said. “We’ve got to know them through their packing of the bags with us and heard some of the stories they have. So, we want to help them as much as we can. Besides that, they are such a blessing to us in the way that they work with us each week.”
