The Steinbach Regional Secondary School donated poutine day sales to the Red Cross to help with wildfire aid. One day sales amounted to 4000 dollars.
Cam Kelbert, grade 9 and 10 principal at the SRSS, says that the school was watching the situation provincially and wanted to get involved.
“We looked into doing a poutine day and having all the proceeds from poutine sales from one lunch to be donated to the Red Cross for the wildfires amount total. So we did, we advertised that with the kids, and the proceeds for one day of poutine was $4000.”
The SRSS does a poutine day every couple of weeks, which students already love. As soon as the school advertised this as a fundraiser, sales doubled.
“We would typically sell about 10 or 11 cases of French fries, and we were well over 20 on that day. So, everybody was aware that there was a little bit more added to this sale than just in a normal lunch.”
Kelbert says that their $4,000 was matched by federal and provincial governments, which then became $12,000.
“We thought that was a fairly significant contribution to a situation in our province and just for basically kids buying a poutine at lunch, it was a pretty easy way to contribute to a disaster that was going on in the province.”
Kelbert says that this is one example of the SRSS’s plan to engage staff and students in the community.
“In our school plan for improving what we do is having full school involvement in different things in the Community, whatever that might be like. We're always looking for something.”
With the SRSS having such a large population, raising 4000 was not a difficult task.
“We're 2100 kids. There's a lot of people in this school. It's bigger than a lot of small communities in the area, so the kids have embraced some of the things that we're trying to do with just improving our entire school involvement in some Community needs.”
Kelbert says that lots of people doing a little bit can move mountains.
“We want to give back to our community where we can and we look for opportunities and people embrace it. The kids embrace it, the staff embrace it.”
Kelbert says the SRSS continues to look for ways to use its population to meet needs within the community.