The North Polk and Ballard School Districts stand arm in arm to help collect non perishable food items for the Ballard food drive which will be distributed out to pantries that support Hukley, Slater, Cambridge and Kelly.

Shortly after the Ballard student council advisor got into an auto accident the Ballard student council quickly started the “Day of Caring” food drive. North Polk Student council has joined them to show support for not only the Ballard student council but also for the communities around the school District.

State student Council Officer and North Polk’s Student Council Advisor, Liz Huether, was one of the people who kick-started the event in North Polk  in a matter of hours after hearing the news about the accident.

When Huether found out about the accident, she automatically thought, “How can we help Ballard out.” Huether quickly started to spread the news about North Polk’s participation in the food drive. “I pulled a couple strings to get things rolling really quickly…I made sure that we had graphics and visuals ready so that people would be aware of what was happening.”

This multi school food drive is the first of its kind that North Polk has participated in. Huether added, “We have done food drives in the past, but we haven’t done one in cooperation with another school… In all honesty we are not going to take any credit for what we are donating because this is all of Ballard.”

Huether wanted to add a special message , “I think it’s just really awesome the amount of support that students and families were willing to give. They hopped right on board, right away. By 8:15 a.m. on Thursday, we had two huge totes and four or five boxes full of food, and people had barely heard about it.”

All the food collected during the event was moved to Ballard high school Friday afternoon to be distributed out to the pantries. Over all the food drive was a huge success raising about 7,433 nonperishable food items between Ballard and North Polk. Chris Deason, assistant principal at Ballard, said, “This food drive was one for the books!”