Princeton Pride

It was officially announced this morning, but I thought I'd pass along that Princeton's Pasta for Pennies campaign raised $38,378.46 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society this year.

We don't know our national ranking just yet, but this brings PHS's ten-year total to over $311,000 for the LLS. I never in my life would have thought I'd be involved in something that raised more than a quarter of a million dollars like this, and I continue to be amazingly proud of our students, staff, and community members.

It was an interesting campaign this year as we ran into hurdles and headaches but still managed to raise more than - I feel confident in saying this - nearly any other school in the nation in those three or four weeks.

Some thoughts...

• I hate the Girl Scouts.
• That's not really true. I hate the fact that the Girl Scouts have an air-tight commitment from the regional Kroger office and we don't have such a thing. This year was particularly frustrating here as we had commitments from individual Kroger stores that were overruled and canceled by the regional office without any contact to us or apology to us. We had students show up at stores on a Saturday expecting to collect and get told that they had to leave. I got to make a couple of really uncomfortable visits to Kroger stores to talk to their managers about those mornings, and it wasn't pleasant for us...or for them, honestly.
  
  The only way to deal with it, however, is to try to get the same air-tight commitment for Pasta for Pennies, and that's a task for the last part of the year and into the summer...'cause otherwise I'm just going to spend the next few years griping about the Girl Scouts rather than actually solving the problem.
• I haven't eaten a Girl Scout cookie in like three years. I'm just sayin'.
• Sometimes it's tough to balance our push for wanting more time, more effort, more whatever for the campaign with the school's rightful push toward academics. When the principal wants a week of state test prep practice, we shift our campaign - because academics are supposed to take precedence over everything else - but it's frustrating at times because that decision probably cost us a thousand or two dollars because it put us into direct competition with the Girl Scouts.
• I don't understand how some teachers don't get involved in the campaign. I sometimes struggle to understand how some classes don't donate even a few bucks as a class, because I care about the campaign, I give every single thing to this campaign.
  
  And I know that I pass by a half dozen other campaigns that matter the same way to other people in the school. I pass by the HOPE Club; I pass by the United Way; I pass by other people's important things because they aren't mine. And from time to time I need to remember that.
• We raised $38,000 this year. It's a total that I feel fairly safe in saying that there won't be more than one or two schools that match it this year...that has only been beaten nine times in the last nine years by any school in the nation. And the reception by the students was sort of non-plussed. They applauded and gave an impromptu drum roll. They did everything they were supposed to. But there was a definite lower level of enthusiasm from them - or at least I was reading it that way, possibly because I had a little bit of it myself. It's weird to be honestly impressed with what the kids and the school have accomplished and also to not be quite excited enough about it because it's less than we saw last year and kind of in line of where we expect to be every year.
  
  I'm thinking that this is what it feels like to be great at something (and here I'm saying that Princeton is great at something, not that I am) because at some point a high level of success becomes expected, becomes almost assumed, and the challenge shifts from creating something great and into maintaining that something great.
• I am still prouder of this campaign and my involvement in it than I am of anything else that I do.