What’s Right With Our Schools: Notre Dame Students Help Clifton Hills

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) – The Chattanooga Area Food Bank is making sure neighbors in the Clifton Hills Community have enough to eat. Students from Notre Dame are lending a strong helping hand. and that is a heartfelt example of what’s right with our schools.

Ketelyn Brewer is the Food Pantry Coordinator for Clifton Hill Elementary School.

She says, “We have been doing this for the last four years, and we serve around 200 of our families. All of them are below the poverty line. The need is great. We’re in, our zip code is one of the poorest in Tennessee. Our families they like, for the last couple years, they’ll wait in their cars for hours; even for the food.”

Christian Glenn is a 5th grader at Clifton Hills Elementary.

She says, “I will bless them with some of these foods, and look, all of us is literally working hard, working our butts off doing this for everybody who needs them. We’re just doing it for everybody. Just doing it.”

Michelle Bertani teaches Spanish at Notre Dame.

She says, ” Today, we have a lot of our students who are here helping unload the truck. As you can see, food for people who need it in this community. We’re helping the people who are underprivileged in this community. And it’s because we don’t want to leave anybody suffering and struggling. We want to help everybody that we can. And so the kids come out here once a month, to help sort out the groceries and put them in people’s trunks. So they can have food for the month.”

Hannah Morais is a Junior at Notre Dame.

Hannah says, “I think it’s just very valuable for us to be able to just be a little part of that; helping take the food from the food bank and give it out to people who need it. And it’s really rewarding too because you can go home and think wow, I did something that definitely helped my community out today.”

Henry Ferris is a junior at Notre Dame.

Henry says, “It’s kind of sad, but it also, it also brings me brings me joy to like see how how like happy they are to to be um to be like receiving things that they need.”

Ketelyn concludes, “People always with tears will say, ‘Thank you so much.’ And they’ll, especially our Spanish families, say like say a blessing like a prayer for us or even just quickly roll down their windows and express how much it means to them. Our students look forward to this day because they know that their family is going to leave with their cars full of food. And um they know that that means food at home.”