Feed the children!

Crothersville students have been doing the ISTEP this week. At our house, not much has changed as far as any habits we do. As always, Patrick has his supper, nightly shower and in bed between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. In the mornings, it's up by 7:00 a.m. sometimes another shower and breakfast then off to school by 7:45 a.m.

Sadly, some kids are so lucky. They don't receive a hot meal, hot shower or bath, 8-10 hours of sleep at night, or breakfast each morning. A group that was recently formed, called Academic Improvement, thought it would be a great idea to feed the ISTEP students breakfast on a morning before their test.

Approximately 250 kids and teachers are doing the testing each day. With the strong winds from hurricane Ike, school was cancelled last week, so the ISTEP had to be put off for a few days. Luckily with the power outages, we hadn't purchased the food yet. We decided once school got back in session this week, Tuesday would be the day we'd cook breakfast for the students testing.

Thanks to Chrystal who went shopping on Monday night and purchased the food from donations we received from our local VFW Post #1083, Scottsburg Jay-C and Mark Combs from Jay-C in Seymour.

At 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning, Zabrina, Chrystal, Shanna, Drew and myself were in the Home Economics room at school, boiling water for the gravy, scrambling eggs in the electric skillets, warming the sausage and biscuits in the ovens, then placing the cooked food in the warmers, waiting on the kids to show up. When it was all done, we had 3 warmers full of biscuits, 1 1/2 warmers full of peppered gravy, 2 warmers full of sausage, 2 1/2 warmers of scrambled eggs, and 16 gallons of white milk, chocolate milk, and orange juice.

After the morning announcements or first group of kids made their way to the Home Ec. room and were served by the Freshman National Honor Society volunteers who had came to the room to help me serve the food. There was about 12 different groups that made their way to the breakfast over the next two hours. It sure makes you feel good to hear the kids thank you for the breakfast and hear all the other comments about how good the food tasted, or how happy they were for the amount of food they received. Denise helped serve the scrambled eggs, her favorite job, and made sure to tell all her fellow students, "Good luck with your ISTEP test today!"

I'm not sure when the results come back to the school from the fall ISTEP testing, or if we'll just read about the scores in the newspaper. But, I'm excited about the results, and hope what we did will help the scores increase from previous years.

Guess we'll find out later...