Centennial Families Donate 3,000 Pounds of Clothing to Sandy Victims

Six, large cardboard boxes filled to the top with clothing and sitting in the parking lot of a warehouse in Warrington proved once again how generous Centennial students and their families can be.

Shortly after Hurricane Sandy finished its destructive rampage through the Mid-Atlantic region, Centennial administration invited the public to donate gently used and new clothes, coats, blankets and other items and drop them of one of the three elementary schools, Willow Dale, McDonald or Davis.

After three to four weeks of collection, the call for help generated between 3,000 and 4,000 pounds. That's the estimation School Board Director Michael Hartline made as he used a forklift to load each of the six palettes onto a delivery truck headed for the Salvation Army.

"I am so thankful for all the hard work our families did to gather these donations," said school board member Jane Schrader Lynch. "I can't even imagine how much we would have if we asked the middle schools and high school to bring in clothes, too."

The donations were gathered up by Hartline, Lynch, and their fellow board members Chuck Kleinschmidt and Mark Miller. The clothes were then stored at a warehouse owned by Hartline in Warrington. A Salvation Army truck arrived Wednesday morning to pick up the boxes and deliver them to centers in New Jersey, which will distribute the clothes to the thousands of families whose homes and neighborhoods were ravaged by Hurricane Sandy.