During difficult and dark times, people tend to resort to the act of wallowing in their own bad luck.

That’s definitely not the case in Perryville.

On March 1, Perryville, a town fifty miles south of Imperial, suffered a deadly tornado that devastated the lives of many citizens as homes were destroyed and public facilities ruined. Instead of allowing themselves to turn to deprivation to cope with the disaster, citizens of Perryville and the surrounding areas immediately started to pick up the pieces of their broken town and fix what was lost in the storm.

The Seckman and Windsor school districts stepped in to help the cause.

“Our goal was to promote a local project within the community and within another school within Jefferson County. We all wanted to help our friends in Perryville that were immediately affected by the tornado. Overall, we definitely met our goal. We filled up three whole buses with can goods to send down to Perryville, and we were also able to fill up one whole bus to send to the local food pantry. This is something that we would want to do again next year. Seckman started the project, and they asked us to jump on board with it. It was project we were willing to help out with, and it was a good unity project between the two schools,” junior Connor Portlock said.

The tragedy in Perryville happened parallel to the planning of Windsor Student Council’s first collaboration with Seckman Student Council’s third annual March for Hunger. The March for Hunger was a collective community effort to fight poverty within the vicinity of the Windsor and Seckman school district. Windsor and Seckman student councils collected can goods as well as other non perishable food items, for the purpose of delivering the goods to the St. Joseph’s Food Pantry.

As news of the Perryville tornado came in and word of the rallied cleanup effort reached Imperial, both schools knew they could make a great difference by providing can goods to victims of the regional natural disaster.

Earlier on Friday, Windsor students marched from the high school to the middle school and finally to the intermediate center. Then, the Windsor students met Seckman students at Mastadon State Park. The students marched five miles down Seckman road, all the way to Seckman High School. Along the way, the students collected can goods and other items to help those in need. 

“We exceeded our initial goal and aim. We surpassed them triple to quadruple what we originally planned on doing. Originally, it was just to help our local food pantry, and when word got out that we were also helping out the folks in Perryville, we had a lady track us down at Windsor Elementary and hand us a check to take down to Perryville. So, it was much larger than we ever anticipated,” student council sponsor JoAnn Marty said.