While corporate and government donations to food banks are down, students in Catholic schools are stepping up to the plate to enthusiastically support local food banks as a significant part of their service programs.

Students conduct canned food drives and hold fund-raisers to buy fresh food. In some schools they prepare and serve meals. They sort donations, stock shelves and distribute food packages. And students do this throughout the year, every year.

At Our Lady of the Assumption School in Carmichael, students conduct food drives, collect cans of soup at parish Masses on “Souper Bowl” Sunday and collect coins during lunchtime throughout the school year to buy fresh milk in their Got Milk? campaign.

Students at St. Mary School in Sacramento conduct monthly canned food drives, collect for Loaves and Fishes dining room, and prepare and serve breakfast twice a month to mothers and children at Wellspring Women’s Center.

At St. Isidore School in Yuba City, the parish food bank feeds area homeless people, the working poor and unemployed migrant worker’s families. St. Isidore students stock the parish food bank each week with “wish list” items such as canned peas or Top Ramen.

The food these students provide has always been important, but now it is becoming crucial.

At St. Catherine of Siena School in Vallejo, when students raised money for the Solano County Food Bank, the food bank’s executive director, Larry Sly, came to the school to accept the check personally and talk with students.

Sly told The Herald that the way food banks feed the hungry is dramatically changing. “We used to rely on large contributions from corporations and governmental agencies,” he said, “and community donations were a welcome addition, always welcome. But now, it’s the other way around.”

Food banks are “relying more and more on the community to give directly to the food bank,” Sly said. “We ask people to organize food drives at companies, law offices, fire stations, workers’ associations and gated communities. School food drives are a tremendous asset.”

Catholic schools deliver the goods when it comes to food drives. In the annual KCRA Kids Can contest, students at St. John Vianney School in Rancho Cordova “brought in more cans than all of the area public schools combined,” said eighth grade teacher Susan Chargulof. She believes that her students’ contributions surpassed the others because “service is part of being a Catholic school. It’s woven into everything we do.”

Other principals across the diocese confirm Chargulof’s observation.

Robert Love, principal of Our Lady of Assumption School, noted “having a Catholic identity means having a strong service ethic and a strong sense of social justice.”

Love said the service ethic at Catholic schools also shapes the adults that the students will become. “Our students learn to look beyond themselves, to look to the larger community and even the global community,” he said. “They also learn that service doesn’t stop when you graduate. It’s a lifelong commitment.”

At Sacred Heart School in Sacramento, principal Peggy Romero reminds students that service means “living the Golden Rule: We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.”

Romero said she is particularly proud of the service projects that her students create on their own. When a few students in the sixth grade learned how to knit small caps, they thought of where those caps could be useful. Soon the entire class began knitting small, soft caps for newborns and premature babies at Mercy San Juan Hospital in Carmichael.

Students at St. Mary School also create their own service projects. In addition to participating in school-wide service projects, each student researches and designs a personal service project. This year the projects include organizing a bone marrow donor registration drive, helping to maintain a little league field, and collecting blankets and towels for the animals at the SPCA.

At the end of the school year, the completed individual projects at St. Mary include a question that asks the students to reflect on their service experience. For younger children, the question is “What did you do?” For the middle grades, the question is “What did you learn?” The older students are asked, “How did this relate to your faith?”

This kind of reflection is woven into the service programs throughout Catholic elementary schools, many principals told The Herald. They maintained it isn’t enough for students to do service projects but the students need to understand what their service means.

Laurie Powers, principal of St. Francis of Assisi School in Sacramento, said “Our goal is that each student understands that, by their baptism, they are instruments of Jesus and need to make the world a better place. Opening their eyes and hearts to those less fortunate is our mission.”

Principal Linda Mazzee of St. Catherine of Siena School in Vallejo makes a similar point. “We hope that our students become aware that there are people around us in need, and that we can give to them in a variety of ways,” she said.

Mazzee proudly observed that when her students were learning about water quality, they raised money to buy mosquito netting for people where malaria is epidemic, and bought water purifiers for people where the water is undrinkable. Then when they discovered that water in their neighborhood storm drains empties directly into San Francisco Bay, they wrote to the city council to help identify storm drains to be labeled.

“You plant seeds with young children,” Mazzee said, “and love is the fruit. I tell my students, ‘They’ll know we are Christians by our love.’”

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