To help the needy during the holidays, Lafayette holds an annual canned food drive to collect various canned and packaged foods. All collected cans go to Circle of Concern, a local food pantry in this area.

With the help of Key Club, National Honor Society (NHS) and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), the canned food drive collected 25,292 cans.

The event started with “Trick or Treat for Cans,” where students went out and collected cans instead of candy during the Halloween season. STUCO Sponsor David Choate  organized this event, where Key Club, STUCO and NHS combined forces to collect  5,000 cans.

After the initial collection, classes were asked to bring in cans, which brought in an additional 20,000 cans.

Circle of Concern came to LHS on Dec. 2 to pick up all of the canned food.

“All the 5th Hour physical education classes came out and helped the loading process, along with students from ROTC who helped box the cans. We had 70 or 80 kids helping out, so we loaded 25,000 cans in about 30 minutes,” Assistant Principal Kirti Merhrotra said.

Among the teachers, there was a competition of whose 1st Hour class would gather the most cans. World language teacher Christine Oswald’s class won the competition by collecting 1,500 cans.

Mehrotra said she wanted to give a special thanks “to ROTC because they distributed cardboard boxes for each class for collection, as well as boxing the 25,000 cans. Also thanks to Jennifer Kelly, Production secretary, who was in charge for our Shop and Save drive which collected 3,000 cans.”