Clothes 4 the Classroom Kicks Off Saturday

Hundreds of families within the Wenatchee and Eastmont school districts were gathered at the Saddlerock Evangelical Presbyterian Church on August 13, preparing for back to school shopping season.

Serve Wenatchee has partnered with Columbia Valley Community Health’s (CVCH) Back to School Health Fair and brought back the “Clothes for the Classroom” program after a two-year hiatus.

Clothes for the Classroom provides free clothes and school supplies for students, preparing to give away supplies to over 1,000 students.

CVCH handed out backpacks filled with back-to-school-essentials such as pencils, pens, colored pencils, notebooks, and crayons for younger students.

“The event is going extremely fantastic,” CVCH Clinical Outreach Coordinator Bryan Cadena Barboza said. “Actually, we prioritized sending about 60 families for every half hour slot that comes by, that way it relieves congestion and it gives the vendors here an opportunity to really connect with families and have that small chitchat time to connect and see how these organizations can help the families out.”

Cadena estimates that within the first half hour of service, they gave out 300-400 backpacks out of the 1,200 backpacks total.

The “Knitwit” volunteer knitting group with the Saddlerock Evangelical Presbyterian Church spent an entire year knitting hats, blankets, and prayer shawls for free.

Knitwit volunteer Ellen Spratt said they brought 850 hats to give away and already gave 100 hats in the first hour.