After hearing the news about families affected by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Metea Valley High School students Ashton and Bryce Howser knew they wanted to help, so they decided to target students with needs that might be overlooked.
“These kids would be going back to school with zero supplies and with nothing because they focused more so on their family belongings,” said Ashton.
That’s why the brothers started collecting school supplies to send to Houston, based on the idea of using what others don’t need to help those in need.
“Last year my brother and I saw kids throwing out school supplies in trash bins at the end of the year,” said Bryce. “So we were like why would you do that instead of putting them somewhere that other kids that would need them can repurpose them and put them to a better use.”
At that time, they wanted to leave “supply buckets” around schools at the end of the year to collect those gently used items.
The idea didn’t take off then, but now Ashton and Bryce are partnering with the City of Aurora and students across District 204 to get the supplies to Houston, putting supply buckets in classrooms to collect new and used items.
They hope to do another drive for local students in May.
“That’s our real target,” said Ashton. “But Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey took a little bit of a precedence over this May school supply drive, so we thought why not target these students first and then once we have the end of the school year come, we can hit these students as well.”
Donations from 19 schools and one church filled 130 supply buckets with more than 200,000 items for students in Houston.
A semi-truck with all the goods will be heading to Houston on October 1.
If you want to help or find out how to donate, you can visit supplybucket.com.
Naperville News 17’s Beth Bria reports.
