The Student Council recently collected an estimated 1,600 toys in a community toy drive for the Kapco Kids2Kids Toy Drive. 

Toys were collected at all schools in the district. In previous years, Stu Co representative junior Braden Baken said that the schools collected items separately, but he said that this year, “We’re gonna take the district, and we’re gonna take the community, and we’re gonna combine it all together so we can accomplish a huge goal, which we did.” 

To increase participation, Stu Co placed donation boxes at the winter sports events and passed out flyers at high school school dismissal time, so parents would see them while picking up their children. 

Baken’s plan of connecting the community to the toy drive also involved distributing information about the drive in all of the bags at the Mequon and Cedarburg Piggly Wiggly stores. Additionally, the Cedarburg Toy Co. gave a $1,000 contribution to the drive.

Stu Co senior class president Tessa Tolomeo said, “We started it early (Nov. 13) because of Kapco.” They arrived Dec. 8 in order to deliver all the toys on time for Christmas. 

“We also picked up toys from the other schools, so we could all just have that one little rendezvous point,” she said. 

Stu Co spent $1,300 from the school itself at Meijer, purchasing toys to add to the total donations. 

On the final day of the drive, the toys were collected by a semi truck and taken to the “Kchip,” the Kacmarcik Center for Human Performance, Kapco’s Grafton office and community space. According to Baken, who is also a member of the Kapco student-led board and helped connect the team to the school district, the donations filled the room and were categorized along the walls. “They filled that entire place. It was awesome,” he said.

According to their website, Kapco’s Kids2Kids program has collected over 300,000 toys since 2005.