PROVIDENCE – As the new school year approaches, backpacks and school supplies are top of mind, especially for charitable organizations looking to help needy families get school supplies for their children.
State, local and federal law enforcement agencies are again joining forces to collect donations of new backpacks and school supplies to help school children in Rhode Island through the Kids, Cops, and Classrooms project.
At the same time, HarborOne Bank announced this week that for the third consecutive year, bank leaders packed and distributed backpacks to local nonprofits to donate to needy families.
HarborOne Bank and HarborOne Mortgage provided more than 5,000 at-risk children with backpacks and educational supplies. On Aug. 7, more than 100 employees of HarborOne Bank and HarborOne Mortgage packed more than 3,000 backpacks at the Brockton Boys & Girls Club. Additionally, the local offices of HarborOne Mortgage provided another 2,000 to nonprofits across New England.
Like the HarborOne initiative, the goal of Kids, Cops, and Classrooms is to help ease the financial burden many families face when it comes to providing their children with the school supplies they need. But the Kids, Cops, Classrooms program also seeks to build bonds between children and law enforcement officers.
“With communities facing increasingly tighter budgets, families are being asked to provide more school supplies for their children and their classrooms than ever before, which poses a tremendous financial burden on families struggling just to make ends meet,” said R.I. State Police Maj. Christopher Dicomitis, who’s leading the Kids, Cops and Classrooms campaign. “We hope the backpacks and supplies we collect through this program will help ease some of this burden for many of these families, while providing children with the school supplies they need to succeed.”
These are some of the supplies being sought through Kids, Cops, and Classrooms:
Small, medium and large backpacks; No. 2 pencils, pens, pencil boxes, boxes of crayons; spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, subject dividers, book covers; index cards, pencil sharpeners, assignment books/weekly planners; rulers (marked in inches and centimeters), protractors, compasses, calculators, scientific calculators.
Also, dictionaries (pocket size), thesauruses (pocket size); mini-staplers and staples; USB flash drives; facial tissues; antibacterial hand sanitizers; boxes of colored pencils, boxes of washable markers, highlighters, watercolor paint set, pad of coloring paper.
Also, large pink erasers, glue sticks, bottles of white glue; safety scissors, two-pocket folders; composition books; wide-rule, loose-leaf papers; graph papers.
Donations can be brought to any state police barracks or local police department.
They will be given to the following agencies for distribution to families: Crossroads Rhode Island; Family Service of Rhode Island; Project Night Vision; Children’s Friend; the Hispanic Ministerial Association of Rhode Island; Multi-Service Center for All; African Alliance; Mount Hope Neighborhood Association; Chad Brown Alumni Association; and the Center for Southeast Asians.
