Our Club’s August service project centered on the Kids In Need Foundation in Roseville.  On August 28 eleven of our members helped the Foundation fulfill its mission by assembling school supplies for children in need and by stocking a school supply center for under-resourced teachers.

 Over a two hour span our entourage began by packing backpacks with school supplies, and then shifted to creating several hundred individual packets of different colored magic markers for the teacher supply room.  Our shift ended by making up large individual packets of pencils for the teacher supply center.

 The Kids in Need Foundation strives to empower under-resource strapped teachers and students by providing them with the school supplies they need to succeed in the classroom.  This, in turn, helps create an equitable learning environment in more impoverished communities.

 The Foundation is the only national nonprofit focusing on the nation’s most under-resourced schools: those where 70 percent or more of the enrolled students are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals.

Reginald Smith Jr. and Anthony Willier, two seniors from Mounds View High School, received STRIVE scholarships from the Shoreview-Arden Hills Rotary Club. Mounds View Principal Rob Reetz, who was the invited speaker at the Rotary meeting, presented the awards to the two students.

STRIVE, which stands for “Students Taking Renewed Interest in the Value of Education,” is a program where the Rotary Club works annually with a high school to motivate junior and senior year students to strive for higher education. These scholarships are awarded to students who may not have excelled academically earlier but have shown marked improvement in their school performance during their junior and senior years. The scholarship money is intended to reimburse them for higher education expenses, which may be used for trade school or two-year or four-year college program.