Every year, beginning in early November, Student Council holds the food drive. This year is Grayslake Central’s 26th Annual Food Drive.

The food drive started off on Nov. 3, where Student Council distributed 7,500 paper bags with the standard instructional flyer with the date of pick up. This flyer lets families know that on Saturday, Nov. Student Council members will collect these bags, so families must leave these outside before 9am.

Specifically, this food drive is looking for canned fruit, vegetables, meat, beans, boxed and canned meals, soup, cereal, oatmeal, pasta, and granola bars.

If families don’t have any food to donate, Student Council is also accepting monetary donations. Checks would have to be made payable to Grayslake Central High School and then put in an envelope into the bag. Donations online would also be accepted. The website for making donations online is https://tinyurl.com/y7tprxq9.

On Nov. 10, Student Council goes back to all the neighborhoods to pick up the bags that are filled with food. If there aren’t any bags outside ready to be collected, students will ring doorbells to ask for any food or monetary donations.  Also, on that day all of the food that has been collected will be weighed and stored until Nov. 16.

On Nov. 16, the food gets pulled out of storage and gets sorted. The food would be sorted by canned meats, beans, vegetables, and fruit would all be separated from each other.

Lastly, on Nov. 17, Student Council members would deliver the food to families who requested food.

For the 26th annual food drive, the goal is to be able to gather 50,000 meals. The goal was 75,000 pounds of food last year. Student Council decided to make this change of pounds to meals because meals of food are more tangible and more relatable to families. Even if Student Council achieves this goal, they will always want to try to strive to reach a bigger goal.

“In a perfect world, our goal is always then to write a check to Avon as well, so that way can buy food when their shelter is empty,” said Lauren Brownstone.

However, Change Wars are new to the food drive this year. Each grade level will compete to see who will have the most change in their milk jugs by Nov. 15. This might seem easy to do, but classes can sabotage other classes by placing bills into the change jugs. Most likely, you would want to place dollar bills into different classes milk jug since, dollar bills would only hinder other classes from winning. Dollar bills going into the milk jug means a subtraction of that amount in pennies.

With the addition of Change Wars, Student Council is trying to get the whole school involved.

“We also want to get other clubs and groups involved, and so far, we have lots of people interested in helping,” said senior Grace Herrmann.  It’s great that the entire school seems to be interested in helping our community and not just Student Council doing all the work. With all of the help that Student Council will be receiving this year, Student Council is very determined that they will meet their goal.

“I think that with the support that were getting for the food drive this year we’ll be able to collect more than last year,” said Herrmann.

Planning the food drive takes a lot of time and work, but for many Student Council members the commitment is worth it.

Junior class president, Kait Consing said that the “[food drive is] the most fun…[and] the most rewarding” event of the year to plan.

If you have any questions about the food drive, or if they missed your bag, feel free to email: gchsfooddrive2018@gmail.com.