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Cinnaminson students give in droves to Food Bank of South Jersey

Cinnaminson students districtwide collected in one day about 3,000 boxes of cereal for the Food Bank of South Jersey. CINNAMINSON – One might expect a grocery store shortage for chicken wings or cheese dip just after Super Bowl Sunday. But thanks to the township school district’s students, something else might’ve been hard to find in Cinnaminson last week.


Posted at 6:00 AM

Cinnaminson students districtwide collected in one day about 3,000 boxes of cereal for the Food Bank of South Jersey.

CINNAMINSON — One might expect a grocery store shortage for chicken wings or cheese dip just after Super Bowl Sunday. But thanks to the township school district’s students, something else might’ve been hard to find in Cinnaminson last week.

In a one-day collection on Feb. 4, students districtwide donated an estimated 3,000 boxes of cereal to the middle school Unity Club’s collection for the Food Bank of South Jersey. Club members and school staff will finish transporting the boxes to donation centers Thursday.

“I guess the ShopRite had no cereal in it after that weekend,” Melissa DeClementi joked.

DeClementi is the district character education facilitator and co-advises the Unity Club with reading teacher Alison Palat. The group collects throughout the year for the Food Bank, which serves Burlington, Camden, Gloucester and Salem counties.

The Unity Club has for years run the collection within the middle school, but DeClementi and other district staff wanted to see students working together toward a common goal as part of the district’s character education programming, so they expanded the cereal drive to all four schools.

“We always say that if you teach them now, they’ll want to keep going when they see the impact they make,” DeClementi said.

She had no idea how big that impact would be. The original goal of the collection was to net “over 2,000 boxes of cereal” in one day.

She said school staff lost count of the donations after 2,500 boxes, and that Unity Club members took about 2,865 pounds of cereal to the Food Bank of South Jersey in Pennsauken, Camden County, last week. District teachers delivered the remaining 350 cereal boxes to the Bread of Life Food Pantry in Palmyra.

To incentivize the one-day drive, any student who brought in at least one box of cereal would be allowed to participate in a districtwide pajama day. However, DeClementi said students understand the importance of giving beyond the possibility of a personal reward.

“They think it’s really neat what we stress in Unity Club,” she said. “If one person does a little bit, look at the difference you can make.”

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