On Sunday afternoon, Aug. 22, Wiscasset Elementary School’s (WES) cafeteria was abuzz with action as volunteers and WES staff worked diligently to lay out and divide school supplies by grade and class. Water bottles, notebooks, pens, pencils and more are now ready for each child at WES to start the new school year thanks to Wiscasset’s Set For Success and Parents In Education (PIE) groups, aided by many group and individual donations. 

Due to COVID concerns, for the second year in a row, Wiscasset’s exciting in-person shopping event was not held, and volunteers and staff gathered the supplies and gave them to the classrooms for distribution on opening day. Hopefully, the ’22-’23 school year will see a return to the joyful experience of having the children and parents attend to get school supplies and haircuts, vision screenings, dental information and more.

New this year was Feed Our Scholars Set for Success' registration of an Amazon Wish List at https://amzn.to/3qbIdrt. Donors could (and still can for next year’s supplies) access the list and either order noted items from Amazon or buy them locally, leaving them at St. Philip’s Church’s hall for storage and transfer to the school.

On top of SFS’s supplying the teacher-required items, Staples, Cook’s Corner, generously donated a Give Them the Goods box of school supplies for each and every child in the school, while Lincoln Medical Health provided soft cases with pencils and erasers. It truly takes a village to raise a child, or many children.

Feed Our Scholars (FOS) is composed of members of St. Philip’s Church, First Congregational Church, and unaffiliated citizens who know children need both a consistent food intake and classroom tools to be successful learners and successful future adults. While the main focus has been to privately provide weekend packs of nutritious foods for students living in food insecure situations, FOS has expanded, via the encouragement and support of Big Al Cohen, to create the Set For Success Initiative, patterned on Boothbay’s strategy that works to provide school supplies for each child regardless of financial ability to pay.  Success for one, success for all.

Want to know more about the group? Become involved? Donate? Call St. Philip’s Church at 882-7184, leaving a message with a return name and number, or check out https://feedourscholars.wordpress.com, or the Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/WiscassetFeedOurScholars/