Thousands of students benefit from project

Opportunity arrived at Danielle Mincks classroom in the form of donated school supplies.

The supplies gave her special-needs students at Northridge High School in Licking County the opportunity to learn about economics by running an inschool store.

The store gave other students the opportunity to buy those supplies at prices they could afford.

Mincks built an entire curriculum around the store, and her students — all with multiple disabilities — got to interact more with their peers.

That’s a lot of opportunity, and just one example of the impact of the Tom Fennessy/mike Harden Back-to-school Project.

Today I make my yearly plea on behalf of one of my favorite charities. For more than two decades, the Fennessy/ Harden project, named for two Dispatch columnists who championed the poor, has been supplying backpacks filled with school supplies to students in central Ohio.

The idea behind it has always been to make sure kids from families in difficulty are able to start school on an equal footing with other students.

What started with 365 backpacks given to kids in Columbus homeless shelters in 1998 grew to 10,800 backpacks distributed across six counties by 2020. This year’s goal is 11,400. Reaching it depends on its organizers raising $90,000 to buy the supplies.

Almost all of that $90,000 will be turned into backpacks, notebooks, pencils, rulers, markers and other educational materials.

“We are a volunteer organization with no paid staff members,” said Terri Leist, who heads the project. “This allows 99 percent of our budget to go toward the purchase of backpacks and school supplies.”

It costs the organization $7.85 to buy and fill each backpack. (Leist, a former city of Columbus administrator, knows how to strike a deal.)

The project also gives some supplies directly to teachers, including

Mincks, for use in their classrooms.

The store that her students ran sold the supplies at deep discounts. The goal was not to make a profit but to help kids who couldn’t afford the basics, she said.

Even at that, the store made $160 last school year, and her students used the funds to buy books to supplement their literature studies.

“The opportunity has really been tremendous,” Mincks said.

There’s that word again.

If you’d like to make sure more kids can be presented with a backpack full of opportunity, here’s how: Go to tomfennessy.org to make a donation or to volunteer your time (it will take 200 volunteers to fill the backpacks in early August).

Or you can send a check to “TF/MH BTSP” at P.O. Box 12234, Columbus, Ohio, 43212.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist. joe.blundo@gmail.com @joeblundo