News

DECA club collects books for youth

DECA members who collected books for the Boys & Girls Club were, first row, Casey Maslow, Kaylene Lee and Mike Vanderbeck, and, second row, Teague Graham, Nick Gooch, Anna Keyser, Patrick Steverson, Jonathan Hensley and Megan Hensley. Standing are Boys &

By Bill Moss, Published: January 21, 2013

When North Henderson High School's DECA members launched a project to collect books for kids at the Boys & Girls Club on Dec. 3, they set a goal of 400. After they got the word out to their classmates, they watched as their fellow students brought in 250 books the first day.

Summer Gould, a junior at North, led the book drive for the Boys & Girls Club.The number kept growing over the next 11 days.
"In all we collected 1,576," said junior Summer Gould, the project chairman. "I think that's the exact number. Pretty positive. I tallied them every single day."
The DECA club adviser is Amy Singletary, a marketing teacher at North. The project was part of the NC DECA Literacy Campaign.
Boys & Girls Club director Scottie Parks thanked the 10 DECA members who delivered several dozen boxes of books.
"What you're doing is helping kids that sometimes don't have the resources to have books at home," he said. "I definitely wasn't expecting to get 1,600 books. I was expecting 400 or so. This is even better."
The books will be put to good use. The club serves about 250 kids a day during the school year and 365 a day in the summer.
"We have homework time and when they're done we encourage them to read," Parks said. "During the summer we have a reading program where we track their reading for incentives, and we have a middle school and a teen library."