Handled With Care : Children and Adults Box Up Food for Needy Families

Working briskly, 13-year-old Karen McAleney sorted through the mounds of food, neatly stacking the red cans of tomatoes on one table, the white boxes of Jell-O on another.

“I like sorting them,” the seventh-grader said brightly.

She had a long way to go.

Karen and dozens of other Ventura students, parents and teachers began Friday to sort through about 50,000 canned and packaged foods that were collected at local public schools and then trucked to Balboa Middle School.

A small army of volunteers is expected to converge on the middle school today to finish the job of sorting the foods and packing them into large gift boxes for 350 needy families.

Volunteers have been doing this for more than 40 years.

Since 1952, the Cheers for Children food drive has mobilized children, school staff and residents across the Ventura Unified School District, from Oak View to Pierpont to Montalvo, for one common purpose: to help feed the families of some of the district’s poorest students during the holidays.

When it began 41 years ago, the charity program collected enough food for five gift packages. This year, volunteers will pack 350 boxes for delivery on Christmas Day.

Balboa sixth-grader Jarrod Castellanos said he stayed after school to work on the project because his parents were also helping.

“My mom made me come here,” said 12-year-old Jarrod, whose mother is a Balboa teacher and whose father is the Buena High School principal. “She thought it would be a good experience for me. I could have been going to Golf ‘N’ Stuff, but I guess this is OK.”

Some children said that helping with the food drive had been their idea.

“I just felt like there are people who are more needy than I am,” said 15-year-old Nidia Garcia, a sophomore at Buena High, as she dug through a box to separate refried beans from chicken chili and vegetable beef soup.

Students collect all of the food for the drive. And district teachers pitch in hundreds of dollars every year to cover the cost of buying one ham for every gift box.

In addition to a ham, each food box contains roughly 50 items, ranging from canned pears to packaged Jell-O mix, and is worth about $100, organizers said.

The families who receive the bounty all have incomes low enough that their children qualify for free school lunches. Each year, school officials select those families that seem to have the greatest need for the holiday help.

One of the men who launched the food drive 41 years ago said he got the idea when he realized just how poor some students’ families were.

“I was at one of the schools and one of the girls was crying,” said Robert Coombs, a retired district administrator who still helps supervise the effort. “I asked her why and she said, ‘I don’t have a dolly.’ Well, I never believed a little girl would not have a dolly.” So Coombs and now retired Buena High teacher Lee Albee launched the first food drive, which eventually spread throughout the Ventura school system.

In today’s poor economy, such food boxes can mean a lot to some children, said Sheridan Way School Principal Trudy Arriaga, who supervised the Cheers for Children effort this year.

“There are lots of families who are unemployed right now,” Arriaga said. “There are lots of single-parent families. There are just lots of families struggling. To receive a box with over $100 worth of food ensures that child will have a good Christmas dinner and lots of good meals after that.”

And the charitable impulses behind the gifts may be just as important as the contents of the boxes for the families that receive them, organizers said.

Mark Smith, a pastor of Trinity Community Church in Ventura and an adviser to a Buena High service club, has volunteered with the charity program for the past nine years.

“It doesn’t help alleviate poverty,” Smith said. “But it gives them a good holiday and a good Christmas and it lets them know at least someone cares.”