Spring Branch ISD Featured News

 

Student councils at Stratford and Memorial high schools took their historic annual week for campus vs. campus rivalry and transformed it into a shared volunteer donation with a huge heart and big community impact.

On Oct. 12, Memorial won by 34-20 the classic football game between Stratford and Memorial hosted at Tully Stadium. On school campuses, however, there was a big joint victory as the two schools collected more than 26,000 food cans for donation this month to area food banks and pantries.

In only its second year, this combined canned food drive topped a 10,000 can goal, and matched last year’s collection of 7,700 cans many times over.

Here’s two high school reports:

Stratford High   

Emma Holland and Ellie Pena (Class of 2018) and the Student Council Officers came up with an idea to turn our rivalry into something good.  

Last year, Memorial High School had 3,000+ donations and we won with 4,700+ donations. 

We challenged them again this year.  Georgia Harper (Class of 2019) and the Student Council officers spearheaded the event. Our goal was to collect 10,000 cans overall.  

As a part of the challenge, the losing school’s principal had to wear the other school’s jersey for the second half of the game. 

This year Memorial had 8,705 donations and Stratford collected 17,555 cans for donation.

Some of our feeder schools helped with the canned food drive, but those numbers didn’t go into each high school’s count.

The combined SBISD total count collected was 26,840. The food cans will now be delivered to our area food banks to go directly back to our community.

Once again, Memorial High Principal Lisa Weir had to wear a Stratford jersey the second half of the football game.  

Thanks to Georgia Harper at Stratford High and Chrystal Wang at Memorial for organizing and advertising this event. The real winner of course are the food banks!

Memorial High

Student Council’s Crystal Wang organized the food drive at Memorial High.

Among generous donors, Memorial publication students Rafi Saqer, Roxanne Mehdizadeh and Ava Lahijani purchased more than $2,000 worth of canned goods through funds raised by a charitable organization the students started last year.

Students with the Anvil newspaper staff helped unload the canned goods at the Bunker Hill HEB before being counted and delivered to an area food bank. Here’s what Rafi and Roxanne report:

"The charity is called Centenia. We chose this name because our generation is called The Centennials. We raised money by making bracelets after Harvey. We used a lot of the money for Harvey victims, but we had some leftover money. We wanted to do something significant with the money we had remaining, so we thought this would be perfect." - Rafi Saqer

"The main goal of the organization is to help young people. We helped some of the Boy and Girl Scout groups at Lamar Elementary after Harvey, and we've given gifts to kids who were in Memorial Hermann hospital over Christmas." - Roxanne Mehdizade 

"For the food drive, we planned it the night before. We called Kroger and Costco but they couldn't get it all together in time. Ava (Lahijani) called HEB and a manager there agreed to pull 2,000 cans for us that night. We went and picked it all up on Thursday and then the Anvil staff helped us unload it." - Rafi Saqer

Go, Spartans and Mustangs!