Students Help Out in Drive for Food

Though they’re far too young to drive mail trucks, students at Placentia’s Sierra Vista Elementary School were doing their part Thursday to help letter carriers with their nationwide food drive.

On Saturday, carriers making their appointed rounds will be collecting canned goods for the needy in the nation’s largest one-day event of its kind. Last year, 45 million pounds of food were collected from homes and businesses nationwide, including 600,000 pounds from Orange County.

In the spirit of the project, Sierra Vista students pulled wagons from room to room collecting donated food that their classmates had brought from home. Representatives of the U.S. Postal Service and the Orange County Food Bank were on hand to applaud them.

The school takes part in WeeDeliver, a national Postal Service project to stamp out illiteracy by encouraging reading and writing. Sierra Vista students have set up stations to collect in-house notices and memos and deliver them.

Student letter carriers and postmasters operate the system, handling a hefty volume of “mail.” They even design stamps.

“Since they do such a good job of delivering mail, we decided to let them kick off our food drive” in Orange County, George Heim of the National Assn. of Letter Carriers said as he watched three students hurry by on their route.

For Saturday’s collection, residents may leave bags of canned or boxed nonperishable foods by their mail boxes before 10 a.m. All donations in Orange County will go to local food banks. The goal this year, local food bank officials said, is to collect 500,000 pounds.

Information: (714) 771-1343.