As December begins, it becomes easy to get lost in the busyness of the holiday season. A lot of times, we get so wrapped up in the receiving end of the season that we forget to give back to others. The students and faculty, however, are making sure that that they remember to give to others this year.

Key Club is sponsoring a campaign with helping others as their main goal. The Headstart Gift Project’s goal is to provide every Head Start student and their siblings with presents for christmas. The Head Start students are preschool students that are taught by Ms. Nestor and the Early Childhood Education students. Run by juniors Teryn Cuozzo and Abby Leonard, many departments and clubs at Tuscarora helped buy gifts for the kids.

“The Head Start teachers gave us little cards that listed all of the gifts that the kids wanted for Christmas. I put that list onto an excel spreadsheet, and then sent that to a bunch of different teachers and groups and asked if they wanted to join our project. Once we had a lot of people that wanted to participate, I split the gifts up amongst them and gave them cards containing a list of gifts to purchase. We collected the presents from them about a month later,” said Cuozzo.

“We got a lot of support from teachers,” said Leonard. “It was actually overwhelming, but very encouraging, because once we had assigned gifts to every teacher, more emailed us saying that they wanted to help. After that, we had to reallocate the presents.”

The presents will be delivered to the Head Start students during the week before winter break, just in time for Christmas.

Still looking to donate gifts this holiday season? The Sophomore class of 2021 is leading a toy drive for INOVA Children’s hospital.

“[The sophomores] are a very motivated group,” said sophomore class sponsor Mrs. Pellicano. “They are very engaged and they do a lot of fundraising for the school, but they also wanted to give back. They thought that kids in the hospital during the holidays was really something that they felt motivated to help out with.”

Toys can be dropped off to the front office, or handed in at the library. Quieter toys such as coloring books, legos, and dolls are recommended for donation, but any toys are appreciated. Gifts can be donated until December 20, the last day before winter break.