Cans lining the walls stacked up in bundles of twelves towering up towards the ceiling, students walking in and out carrying more stuff than they can handle, and a folding table covered with color-coded tally sheets. This would have been what your day looked like if you were one of the 40 excused students on Dec. 8 at North Platte High School. For senior Cole Kleinow, it was a great day. “I felt invested in that I needed to be here. I never really ever wanted to leave,” he said.

The 2017 canned food drive began on Dec. 5 and ended on Dec 8. However, the junior class got an extra week to meet their goal because they fell short in the regular time.

The big day began with the help of North Platte Public School District maintenance supervisor, Eugene Pursley, and his crew. They showed up at 7 a.m. to get the tarps laid out to protect the gym room floors. This year the school met their goal with 99,784 points.

If every grade met their goal NPHS promised a pizza party for the whole school. But, if the juniors don’t make their goal by the end of the day, they won’t get any pizza. Some students felt that the money spent on pizza should be used as a donation instead. However, it would be illegal to donate school funds.

All of the food and money donations will go to three different organizations: The Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and Grace Ministries. The food drive raised 19,328 cans. If you were to stack up all the cans end to end it would the equivalent to 6.818 Eiffel Towers. Also, all the food collected could feed one person for 9.39 years.

The wrestling, basketball, and swim team had competitions held out of town on the day of the drive. However, this didn’t keep the cans from coming in. Even though this year wasn’t one of the best years that NPHS has had, it still was pretty impressive. Student Council supervisor, Kirk Livingston said, “We go through a cycle of three blowout years and then one pretty good year. That was this year.”

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Before the canned food drive began the maintenance crew laid out all the tarp to protect the gym floors.