Box Tops for Education

This past school year I volunteered to be the "Box Tops for Education" collector and counter. I did some advertising with the Yokota Officer's Spouses Club, the school's, neighbors and homeschooling parents and urged everyone to give me their box tops. It is a wonderful program that is sponsered by General Mills. You can find box tops on most cereals, Old El Paso products (even the salsa lids have box tops underneath), Huggies products and some Cottonelle products to name a few. For each box top sent in by the school, General Mills will give the school 10 cents in return. The box tops are about a half an inch by a quarter of an inch, they vary in size. It was my job to promote the program, collect the box tops, count the box tops, keep a running count of box tops for each classroom, package the box tops into packages of 50, oh and they forgot to tell me when I took the job, cut each box top down to the dotted line. Minor detail if your not dealing with over 12,000 box tops.

When all was said and done we collected over 12,000 box tops, a little over $1,200 for our school to spend on our students. Well done Joan K. Elementry School! Lexi's class collected the most box tops, almost 1,300 box tops, so they won the ice cream party. Lexi missed the party because we were in Cabo. She grumbled about missing the party when we were in Cabo, but I quickly set her straight by saying, "Would you rather be on the beach in Cabo eating ice cream or in your classroom eating ice cream?" Enough said!

The box tops for education program is a wonderful program. Even if you do not have school aged children I recommend, saving your box tops and giving them to someone who does have school aged children or you can even drop them off at your local school.

Needless to say I will not be counting box tops next year. I am glad I had the opportunity to help this year, but by the end of this year I was waking up in the middle of the night having nightmares about box tops! Thanks General Mills for implementing this program and giving our children a better education for doing so.