Student volunteers at west side school send 20,000 meals to Haiti

Indianapolis students at a west side school volunteered Thursday morning to help send 20,000 meals to kids in Haiti.

Around 50 students at Northwest Middle School helped pack enough meals to feed 100 students for an entire year.

Assistant Principal Adriana Berry said the food packing effort is part of the school's commitment to being an IB World School. The standards for International Baccalaureate diplomas require students to participate in CAS experiences, which stands for creativity, activity, and service.

"One of the parts of it is helping your school, helping your community, and then being a global citizen," said Berry. "And so we see a problem, do something about it, fix it. Work together to solve it."

Berry said students at Northwest Middle School are particularly well equipped to tackle world problems. She said 19 languages are spoken by students at the school, and that a significant number of students come from families where English is spoken as a second language.

Many of the students volunteering came from Haitian families.

This meal packing project was done through partnerships with Kids Against Hunger, which supplied logistics for the meal packing, and Mission of Hope, which will take the packed food and distribute it to schools in Haiti.

Mitchell Cline works as the director of events for a division of Kids Against Hunger and works on the development team for Mission of Hope.

Cline said the food will go to a handful of schools run out of churches in Haiti, an effort to encourage parents to send their kids to classes more regularly.

"What a lot of parents see is, 'Oh, my kid can get a meal if they go to this school,'" said Cline. "So that's encouraging education, which we believe to help generations from now. We want to see education grow."

Northwest Middle School raised $7,000 last December to make the meal packing project possible.

Contact WFYI Digital Producer and Reporter Jeremy Reuben at jreuben@wfyi.org