Schools

Green-Fields Jeans Drive Nets 550 Pairs for the Homeless

Students at the school helped bring in jeans for Aeropostale's Teens for Jeans program.

Quite a few homeless kids will get a pair of jeans, thanks to the efforts of students at Green-Fields Elementary.

After a month-long effort in Aeropostale's annual Teens for Jeans program, four classrooms pulled together about 550 pairs of jeans—including about 100 pairs on the last day alone—which are earmarked for the Coalition for the Homeless in New York.

Third-grade teacher Gaetan Pappalardo, who, along with third-grade teachers Jennifer Hawkins and Mary Jacobs and fourth-grade teacher Joanne Keating, helped run the effort this year, said as the pile of jeans grew larger, the the problem of homelessness became more real to the students.

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“The biggest thing is they helped 500 people,” Pappalardo said. “That's a big number to them.”

The students even got a bit of a geometry lesson in the process, figuring out the cubic feet of Pappalardo's Volkswagen and determining how much space the jeans took up. If you were wondering, about 276 pairs fit in a Volkswagen Golf—assuming you put the back seats down first.

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Just four classrooms pulled together that total this year, and Pappalardo said they're hoping to build on that success and involve more of the school for 2013.

This was Aeropostale's fifth annual Teens for Jeans program, a nationwide effort that’s helped collect and donate 1.5 million pairs of jeans to homeless shelters around the country.


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