Skaneateles Middle School Student Council’s annual holiday shopping spree is one of the most wholesome events of the school year.
Thanks to generous funding from the CNYCentral Foundation, Todd’s Fund, and the Middle School Student Council, middle school students have the unique opportunity to shop for local charities and provide gifts for children in need.
This year, the students went shopping at Walmart on Wednesday, Dec. 7.
The shopping spree had special meaning for Middle School Student Council officers Beckett O’Brien, Colton Bone, Peter Salzhauer, and Magnus Arroyo, who have been hard at work planning for the big day. The officers, who participated in last year’s shopping spree, were surprised to learn how much work goes into making the event a success.
“We’ve been meeting every day during activity period (AP) and some people even stay after AP to work,” said Salzhauer. “In previous years it’s just been like: ‘the shopping spree’s happening,’ then we would wait a couple of weeks, and then there would be a meeting and the next day you’d just go.”
“You don’t see what happens behind the scenes,” said Bone. “It’s a lot more work than we thought it would be, but it’s a lot of fun.”
One of the officers’ first tasks was to come up with a design for the t-shirts everyone will wear at the shopping spree.
“We helped with the t-shirts in past years, so we kind of had an idea of what we needed to do,” said Arroyo. “We all came up with different ideas and then we finalized one that we all liked.”
The students agreed that the toughest part of the planning process was determining the groups students will shop with. They tried to group students with others from the same grade and those who knew each other, but it wasn’t easy to adhere to everyone’s wishes.
“We made groups for everyone and made little folders that had all of the information they were shopping for and who was in each group,” said O’Brien. “It was hard because a lot of people wanted to be with each other, and sometimes we couldn’t work that out.”
The officers are excited to see their hard work pay off at the shopping spree, and hope that the other students appreciate the opportunity to help others this holiday season.
