Box Tops Lady

I missed the last couple days of November, but 20-some posts in November is better than 4 or whatever I was doing before. I look forward to sharing Christmas posts this month. We went to a fun little festival this morning and saw Santa, and we've a couple of other holiday activities this week, so pictures to come! Also, I think we're taking the potty-training plunge tomorrow, and I'll certainly have stories!

So last year when Katy was in kindergarten, I volunteered in her classroom a couple of times a month. But it was a challenge because Melanie had to watch the boys around her work schedule. I was excited this year to find a way to volunteer to help at her school without having to find childcare. I volunteered to be the Box Top lady.

Many of you probably collect Box Tops and Campbell's Labels For Eduction for your own schools. But basically you can find these little coupons on various products that you buy - each Box Top is worth 10 cents, and the Labels are worth certain numbers of points toward merchandise from a catalogue. So all the students in the school collect them at home and put them in a box in the hallway at school. I empty the box periodically and then recruit friends (other moms at the school) to help me sort and bundle and count them. They have to be trimmed to a reasonable size (some people just rip the whole top of the box off), sorted into different point values, bundled into groups of 50, and packaged to ship back to the company. This past submission, we earned $1200 worth of Box Tops, which was 12,000 Box Tops that were processed. We also collected several thousand Labels. I had recruited a group of 6 moms, and it took us almost 3 hours to do all of that.

But this week I got to experience the reward. Part of the position is also determining what the school needs the most and spending the money/points accordingly. The first batch of equipment that I ordered arrived, and I went to school and passed it out. Some of it was for gym class, and some of it was for outdoor recess. I hadn't even told Katy about any of this, and that afternoon when I picked her up from school, I asked, "So what happened at school today, anything new?" The first thing she said was, "We got new stuff for recess! New jump ropes, these little skip things that go around your ankles, soccer balls and big bouncy balls...." Then a neighbor girl skipped up to us and said, "Yeah, I loved the new skip things!" 

It was nice to have some tangible evidence that all those hours and collecting and sorting and clipping ended up amounting to something. (Good equipment for recess is important, I think!) And we've got another order to place this month, so there's more to come.