CAMARILLO : Store Receipts Earn School Equipment

Parents with children at Las Colinas School in Camarillo collected more Vons receipts than 4,700 schools statewide this year, winning computers and electronics equipment for the school.

“The school budgets run so tight that we wouldn’t be able to get these things otherwise,” Principal Bill Lamp said.

For turning in $1,578,175 worth of receipts, the supermarket chain gave the school three free Macintosh computers with software, five 27-inch color televisions and 60 calculators as part of Vons’ Apples for the Student Program, Lamp said.

Vons awards one Macintosh computer worth about $3,000 for every $325,000 in receipts turned in.

“Sure beats a lot of bake sales,” Lamp said.

Parents Kathy O’Riley and Linda Galtress, who are sisters and work as flight attendants for American Airlines, led this year’s campaign. More than 1,000 students attend Las Colinas.

They and seven other mothers each worked an average of 25 hours a week from September to the end of January, collecting receipts, cutting off and highlighting the totals, and then bundling them into packages of $1,000, O’Riley said.

She and her sister even went so far as to place a collection box in the flight attendants’ lounge at Los Angeles International Airport.

When they learned they had won, “We were elated. We really wanted to win this year,” O’Riley said.

Last year, the school collected $1.3 million in receipts, and won five computers.

“We have a really spirited school; they really seem to pull together at times like this,” Galtress said.