Friendly Competition Breeds Success for Stoughton High Food Drive

The back and side walls of Liza Farquharson’s classroom at were lined with bags and boxes of food—everything from cans of vegetables like peas and carrots to macaroni and cheese to what seemed like a lifetime supply of Ramen noodles.

Farquharson teaches Spanish, so more accurately, her class was filled with vegetales like guisantes y zanahorias, macarrones con queso and, well, boxes of Ramen noodles—is there a translation for that?

Farquharson and Elyssa Schneider’s Spanish classes recently held a food drive, and their ten classes combined to bring in 2,632 items that will be donated to the Stoughton food pantries.

This is the third year Farquharson has helped to organize this community service project. The first year about 500 items were donated; last year about 2,000 were donated; but this year exceeded expectations.

“I don’t think [the students] understand how amazing this is,” Farquharson said.

Five of Farquharson’s freshmen students in her Spanish 2 Honors class—Maya Barrant, Kayla Burgos, Megan McManon, Menuchim Omodu-Amadi and Jon Silva stayed afterschool recently to share their experience.

Their D-Hour class brought in 705 items alone over the two-week food drive, more than any of the other nine classes that participated.

The students said they were motivated to give back to the community, but were also driven by competition and the prize for coming in first.

First there was a competition between Farquharson and Schneider’s classes to see which group of five classes could collectively bring in the most items. Farquharson’s five, led by her D-Hour bunch, brought in more than 2,000 items, earning all five of her classes an in-school fiesta.

Then the top class for each teacher earned a field trip to enjoy lunch at El Sarape, a Mexican restaurant in Braintree (there is a catch—the students will have to speak Spanish at the restaurant).

Farquharson’s D-hour class ended up edging out her B-hour class (638 items) to secure their spot on the trip. They’ll join Schneider’s Spanish 4 Honors class at the restaurant.

“We wanted to help the needy,” Omodu-Amadi said.

“But we wanted to beat everyone else too,” Barrant quickly added.

Students would bring in bags of food and drop them off in Farquharson’s classroom before school started, but sometimes they got stuck carrying around all the food from class to class until they had Spanish.

The D and B hour classes, both Spanish 2 Honors, went back and forth over the course of the two weeks, with students “spying” on one another to see how much food they had to bring in to retake the lead.

Silva started a Facebook group to organize his classmate’s collection efforts. He brought in more than 200 items alone. Barrant brought in 128 and Burgos, McManon and Omodu-Amadi combined to bring in more than 130 items.

Farquharson is planning a field trip for her students so they can personally deliver the items to the food pantries.

“I’m excited to see what it’s like,” Burgos said.

“It’s amazing people were inspired to bring all this in,” Barrant added.

Turns out in this competition, everyone was a winner.