Madeleine Choir School students donate their sweets

Madeleine Choir School

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Courtesy of The Madeleine Choir School

Salt Lake City — Sixth-grader Roma Jane Maloney inspired The Madeleine Choir School student body to donate 384 pounds of Halloween candy to Operation Gratitude.

Maloney proposed the candy donation as a service project for her 6th-grade class when she campaigned for MCS Student Council class representative this fall. Sixth-grade teacher Andrea Sline suggested an inter-class competition and fifth-grade teacher Kate Wiltsey, along with the Student Council, ramped up the expectations and publicized the event.

The turn-in began Nov. 1 and finished Nov. 5. Classes competed to bring in the most candy. The winner was the Kate Regier/Tyler Knibbe third-grade class, with 71 pounds.

"We got ten times [more] candy donated than we expected!" said Maloney.

"Our hearts are full. This was a fantastic response to a project we hadn’t tried before," said Maloney’s mother, Maria Maloney, who weighed the candy and shipped it off to Operation Gratitude. "It’s more than one pound of candy per student donated," she added.

Operation Gratitude annually sends more than 100,000 care packages filled with snacks, entertainment items and personal letters of appreciation addressed to individually named United States military service members deployed in hostile regions, to their children left behind and to veterans, first responders, wounded warriors and their caregivers. Their mission is "to lift morale, bring a smile to a service member’s face and express to our armed forces the appreciation and support of the American people."

Courtesy of The Madeleine Choir School