East Meadow High School and Barnum Woods Elementary School students held a fund raising basketball tournament this past holiday season. Through their collective efforts, over 650 canned food items were collected to help those in need.

East Meadow High School sophomores Laura Green, Andrew Meranus, David Merkur and Matt Weiss organized this year's "Hoops to Help the Hungry" fundraiser as part of social studies teacher Gerald Scherer's semester-long leadership class. The assignment for the class was for students to develop a community or school based organizational project. Over the past eight years that Scherer has been teaching the class, his students have organized a number of beneficial projects including ongoing student mentoring programs, holiday food drives, fund raisers, and collections for various organization like Bide-a-Wee and Doctors without Borders.

This year at Barnum Woods, the students developed the basketball fund raiser to gather food for soup kitchens on Long Island. Barnum Woods fifth graders collected the items and then had the opportunity to shoot baskets for a period of time depending on how much they collected. Excitement and fun ensued as students competed against each other to make the most baskets. Each participant received a certificate for his or her fund-raising efforts. New York Islander tickets were awarded to the students with the most baskets and the most cans of food. Dennis Leavy won the canned food collection with a total of 27 cans. In the boys free throw competion, James Mongillo took first place and Andrew Sidney placed second.

The program proved to be highly successful and Scherer expects more great projects like this one from his Spring semester leadership class.