Little Red Schoolhouse finds new way to distribute supplies during COVID-19

For nearly 30 years students and their families have shown up to the Little Red Schoolhouse’s backpack giveaway to stock up on school supplies at no cost to them.

This year, due to COVID-19, the giveaway looked completely different, but will accomplish the same goal.

Instead of students and families filling Komachin Middle School’s gym to collect their own supplies, cardboard boxes took up most of the space. The boxes — filled with various supplies bought in bulk — were set up along the gym’s collapsed bleachers and separated into piles for each school district to pick up and haul off. This year, the districts will be in charge of getting the supplies to their students, said Judy Kimmeldorf, co-chair of the nonprofit Little Red Schoolhouse organization.

Normally, Kimmeldorf works with a team of volunteers to give out supplies to more than 3,000 children in Thurston County through the annual giveaway. She said it was a easier this year because “we just set up things in boxes. Before we had to put them in bins and bags and put them in a room with a good flow system and direct people around.”

Kimmeldof and her small group of volunteers helped to load boxes onto the school district’s vans and then sent them off.

While the event went by fast and took a lot less volunteer labor (Kimmeldorf joked about normally being exhausted by the end of previous years’ giveaways), Kimmeldorf and fellow co-chair Debbie Haddock, both former Komachin Middle School teachers, missed the excitement of years past.

“We often have as many as 300 volunteers help set this whole thing up,” Kimmeldorf said, “so it’s real disappointing to a lot of people [who would have been volunteers] as well as to the people who come to get supplies.”

“It’s kind of relaxing, but not what we would have wanted,” said Haddock, “We just want to make sure the kids get what they need.”

This year, donations from Thurston County local businesses, banks and credit unions helped raise roughly half of the annual budget for the organization. More money came through a grant from Washington state, which brought this year’s budget to around $52,000.

“People in town have been very motivated,” Kimmeldorf told The Olympian in a phone interview on Wednesday. “We had a marvelous event on Friday, radio day, and we raised lots of money. ... I think everybody wants to help and everybody is sad about it, but we’re trying to put a good face on it and we’ll come out stronger.”

KXXO Mixx 96.1 radio station has been spreading the word and collecting donations for the Little Red Schoolhouse for years and 2020 was no different. The radio station collected nearly $23,000 from the community for the supply giveaway.

All the money raised for Little Red Schoolhouse goes towards buying school supplies and for renting a shed to store the supplies until the giveaway, Kimmeldorf said. “We’re all volunteers and none of us gets paid ... so we have all that money to spend on stuff for kids,” she said.

Each year Thurston County school districts send the organization a list of what supplies their students will need for the coming year. This year, students will be taking their classes remotely, through digital online learning programs.

Some parents messaged the organization saying the supplies being given out are not useful or necessary for their children because they’re doing school online.

“I think the need is even greater,” Haddock said. “And if you’ve got three kids, you’ve got to have your supplies go somewhere, you can’t spread them out over the table. So they keep the backpacks and they keep the things in there — it’s an organizational tool.”

“It’s kind of like carrying your locker around,” said Kimmeldorf.

“It’s not like you’re never going to need a pencil again,” Kimmeldorf added. “Stuff happens and it’s going to try and be as regular as possible. Kids will need what they needed before, they’ll just use it differently. ...

“I think things happen in ways that are sort of normal but different. Just like we’re kind of normal here — distributing — but it’s different.”

This story was originally published August 21, 2020 at 12:19 PM.