Members of the local Junior B hockey team, 100 Mile House Wranglers, joined the students of Forest Grove Elementary School for the school’s Hot Lunch program on Jan. 30.
“This program that we’re running, we do breakfast in the morning and we have parent volunteers every single morning that put snacks out for students and every two weeks we do a hot lunch. It’s funded about 50 per cent by parents and 50 per cent by a grant we get called Community Lunch,” said Mark Doolin, principal of the school.
According to Doolin, the program costs about $10,000 to run for the year.
The lunch is made by the PAC group. This lunch, they made chicken caesar salad, chicken nuggets and garlic bread.
“What a wonderful program they’re running for the school. It makes it like a family but it is also so supportive of our kids,” said Doolin, who has been at the school for ten months.
All the staff is also fed as well.
The program has been running for around ten years.
The Wranglers being there for the lunch just added another dimension to it for the students, who spent most of their time getting jerseys signed, asking questions or hanging off of the players.
Doolin said it was interesting because one of the teachers wrote an email to the hockey organization asking if they could send some players out to the school a week before. Doolin then received a call (independently from the email) the next day and was told the team had a new program where they were sending players out to local schools to spend time with the students.
“So when they called me I said it was perfect timing because I said we actually wrote you yesterday to invite you to our hot lunch program,” he said.
After lunch, the seven Wrangler players who came out played floor hockey with some of the gym classes and then answered questions during an assembly. They also gave out some free Wranglers-branded T-shirts to two lucky draw winners.