Assumption Kids On A Roll With Their Toilet-Paper Drive

Spokane’s schoolchildren regularly gather food, mittens, coats, books, even soup-can labels to help the needy.

Assumption Catholic School stages a drive each year to collect a more delicate personal necessity - toilet paper.

Assumption principal Sally Meriwether offers no apologies. People need toilet paper. But too often, she says, it’s something poor people can’t afford.

Food stamps won’t pay for it. And clients of such social service organizations as Ogden Hall, Catholic Charities and the Spokane Neighborhood Centers are always in need of it.

So for the fourth year in a row, the 312 students of Assumption have had a toilet-paper drive. They collected 2,699 rolls, just one less roll than last year.

“The idea of collecting toilet paper tickles the kids,” said Sister Meg Sass of Catholic Charities. “This is something that will stick in their minds as they grow up.”

The week-long drive ended with a four-foot tall, six-foot wide mountain of toilet paper in the corner of Assumption’s gym. For a week student council members Janelle Bennett, Mike Lucke and Sarah O’Brien have given up their recesses to count rolls and make charts to document the progress.

Assumption will turn the paper over to Sass next week. Then Sass and some students will deliver it to wherever there is the biggest need.

It was Sass who suggested that the school collect toilet paper.

“I was looking for something to make kids understand what it’s like to be poor,” Sass recalled. “We don’t all know what it’s like to really be hungry. But we’ve all been caught without toilet paper sometime.”

That year Assumption’s drive stocked the dorms at Whitworth College, where homeless moms and kids were being housed. Other years, toilet paper collection by Assumption students has been handed out in food baskets at the Spokane neighborhood centers. Other times it’s given to shelters like Ogden Hall and the Union Gospel Mission.

“This really is for kids and moms. I watch moms’ eyes,” Sass said. “When there are a couple rolls of toilet paper in a food box - not to mention tooth paste and shampoo - there’s a sigh of relief.”

Enough violence

Garry Middle School teacher Ellen Gillespie has had enough of the violence that teens live with every day.

So she drew up a plan to help make her students aware of violence, how to prevent it and how to avoid it.

Gillespie submitted her plan to Cox Cable and MTV, which were sponsoring a contest for teachers in conjunction with a report on teen violence called “Enough is Enough.”

She won the contest’s top regional prize: a TV and VCR for her classroom.

“If we can make kids more aware of what is happening around them all the time they can make the right choices,” Gillespie said.

A big class pet

Madison Elementary third graders are raising money to adopt an orca.

No, the whale won’t come to live at Madison. The orca, named Mozart, lives in the waters near The Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Wash. Mozart travels in with two brothers, his mother and grandmother.

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