Summer may be less than half over, but volunteers at the Marblehead nonprofit SPUR are already hard at work collecting school supplies for more than 600 students in need in Marblehead, Swampscott and Lynn.
With the help of volunteers and sponsors, SPUR will provide students from low-income families with backpacks filled with pencils, crayons and more.
Kim Nothnagel, director of SPUR’s communications and community relations, believes that these students often don’t have an equal opportunity to thrive in academic environments because they lack access to quality school supplies, and that this drive gives them an equal shot at success.
“For the kids that get these backpacks, it’s a chance to fit in,” she said.
SPUR purchased school supplies, which were delivered to their Anderson Street office last week.
“Our offices are absolutely bursting with boxes of Crayola crayons and three-ring binders, and notebooks, index cards and backpacks, and all that good stuff,” Nothnagel said.
Now, SPUR is asking for community members to consider sponsoring students.
“If you go on our website (spurnorthshore.org) , you can see a button on the top that says sponsor a student, and that shows you all the different ways you can sponsor.”
They are also talking to social service providers to get a specific number of students for the drive this year. On July 21, volunteers will meet at SPUR to fill the 600 backpacks with school supplies for the fall.
This project has been long in the making. It began all the way back in February, when SPUR began contacting vendors to get school supplies.
“Even though we’re talking about crayons for the first of September, we need to figure out how to get them more than six months before that,” Nothnagel said.
This drive has been a tradition at SPUR for almost a decade. Nothnagel believes that making school supplies accessible to these 600 low-income students is making a huge difference, and that it gives them a real chance to succeed.
“This is a chance for them to feel just as deserving as all the other kids in that classroom to succeed and to thrive and to learn,” she said. “So when you sponsor a backpack, you’re not just giving pencils and crayons, you’re giving a kid a chance to thrive.”
