Tyrone High School junior Lexi Hess and senior Kenzie Soellner organized a successful winter clothing drive in December for their National Honor Society community service project.

Hess and Soellner had an ambitious goal of collecting 600 donations, which they nearly achieved with 593 total donations.

They accepted gently used coats, new hats, scarves, mittens, and gloves for local families in need. Donations were open for the community to deliver, and students were encouraged to bring items.

Most of the donations went to the Family Closet at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Tyrone. The rest of the donations were put in local clothing donation bins that go to homeless shelters and those in need.

“[We] would like to thank Mackenzie and Lexi for choosing The Family Closet for their community service project. Their thoughtfulness and donations were appreciated by both the church and the community,” said Family Closet Coordinator Jane Hyde.

Sollener and Hess recognized the need for warm items and figured this would be the perfect opportunity to help.

“We chose winter items to be the donations because we knew that it was going to start getting chilly,” said Soellner, “We wanted to make sure everyone had the proper clothing to stay warm.”

As active members of the Tyrone chapter of the National Honor Society, they are required to coordinate a project to help and give back to the community.

Both are members of the Eagle Eye, so they used their school paper to promote their donation drive and personally donated cookies and juice boxes to the winning elementary, middle, and high school classrooms.

The winning classrooms were Ms. Black’s 3rd-grade class, Mrs. McClelland’s 5th-grade class, and Ms. Beigle’s 12th-grade class.

Hess and Soellner were both appreciative of the generous donations from the students and the community.

“Receiving so many donations was exciting as we got to see everyone contributing to help their community,” said Hess. “We were really happy with the outcome of the drive and were excited to see so many people participated.”