By Amber Cox, Staff Writer
MANSFIELD – At a time for giving during the holiday season, Mansfield Elementary School participated in a “Sweet Sock-A-Thon” on Dec. 17.
Students began collecting socks and candy on Dec. 6 and assembled sock gifts for the Atlantic City Rescue Mission (ACRM).
One local family has been visiting the ACRM for the past five years on Christmas to help prepare and serve meals to over 1,000 homeless men, women and children. The “sweet socks” are tube socks stuffed with candy and wrapped with a bow.
Mansfield Elementary School Human Resource Specialist and Public Relations Officer Marlene Walls said the local family saw a group of people who brought a box of socks with candy in them and decided to participate in the project. In 2009 the family was able to take 600 “Sweet Socks” to the ACRM.
School nurse Lynn Schaefer wanted to get the children at the school involved the project and has been working on a way to do so since last year. As of Dec. 16 there were 1,035 pairs of socks at the school and Ms. Walls said she believes there will be well over 1,200 socks stuffed with candy and wrapped with bows to take down.
“The socks will keep them warm and the candy is to put a little bit of a smile on their faces during the holiday season,” Ms. Schaefer said. “Over the last few days that’s what we’ve been talking to the students about. We have members from our community coming in and helping and I can’t think of anything better, it’s really amazing.”
Members from the local 55-and-over communities volunteered their time to help the younger students assemble the socks.
Third-graders Kyndal Tillett and Elizabeth Banas said they enjoyed assembling the socks and the fact that they got to help people.
“It’s not really fair if someone has like $1,000 and they have everything and the other person is poor and they have nothing,” Elizabeth said. The local family also collects hand lotion and lip balm to hand out on Christmas.
“One of the big things that we try to do with the kids, part of character building, is to try to build empathy and a sense of joy that you get from helping someone else,” Ms. Schaefer said. “So this project, is that respect is two-fold, it’s to help our students with that ethic and to help the homeless.”
All students were included in assembling the gifts, including special needs students in inclusion classrooms.
The YALE School in Mansfield for special needs student rents several classrooms from Mansfield Elementary School and those classes also participated in the “Sweet Sock-A-Thon.”
“The ‘Sweet Sock-A-Thon’ works two miracles, providing warm socks and offering a small gift of hope,” said Ms. Walls.
