“This is so cool,” Wiscasset Elementary School’s new assistant principal Laura Mewa said. All around her in the cafeteria Friday, Wiscasset Feed Our Scholars’ Set for Success volunteers in face masks were, like her, lugging in box after cardboard box of school supplies.

“This is amazing, the volunteers, this program, the time that goes into it, how they’re providing essential resources that our kids need – that all of our kids can access – it’s just amazing,” Mewa said.

Organizers said about $3,000 in donations came in for year two of the program that helps students start the school year right. This year, as with Boothbay Region’s Set for Success, it happened without an event for families, due to the pandemic. Instead, the goods were being sorted for teachers to distribute, organizers said. One pickup truck bed was full of items bought at cost from Big Al’s, Sharman Ballantine said. Other items were bought from Amazon or elsewhere, she said.

“We’ll group things by the type of supplies, and then we’ll have lists from the approximately nine teachers, then we’ll box things for each teacher,” Ballantine said as the box opening continued. “And then it’ll be up to each teacher to separate the things out for each student.” So there were lots of containers – pencil boxes, shoebox-size boxes, sandwich bags and gallon bags – “all because (teachers) are going to be keeping things separate. Instead of having a big bowl of crayons, everyone will have their own,” Ballantine explained.

About a dozen people showed up to help Friday. “I’m heartened,” fellow organizer Gretchen Burleigh-Johnson said early in the work. In an email response Saturday on how it went, she wrote: “We had difficulty getting a printout of the class order list at the school, necessitating a run to St. Philip's to use their copier. Once the list arrived and the group was organized, the actual sorting went very quickly.

“We found a few minor items that still need to be obtained, but every class has materials boxed, labeled, and waiting in the cafeteria for the teachers to claim them. We also have left a surplus of notebooks, pencils, markers and such in storage at the school for future need.”