LANETT — It is commonplace for one to see “Back to School” and think spending money on supplies, clothes and other student necessities. Lanett’s Knauf Insulation realized this and decided to do something about it.

On Friday, July 27, Knauf borrowed the kitchen of The Summit Church in Valley in order to prepare the chicken lunches that they had pre-sold in the weeks leading up. These lunches were sold to other industrial park businesses with all proceeds going to Greater Valley Area elementary schools.

“We have an ideas committee team and this was one of their ideas,” Process Engineering Manager Tamela Austin said. “There has been a really big push this time every year to help the community by giving them back to school supplies. This was their idea to help out.”

From 6 a.m. Friday morning until around the noon hour, Knauf employees worked to put the boxed lunches together. Since orders came from the industrial park, and business who bought 15 or more plates had the food delivered to them. The tickets for the meals were pre-sold and by the end of Thursday afternoon, the team was ready to prepare 315 plates.

“It went really, really well,” Human Resources Manager Aimee Schmidt said. “We had a great team effort from Knauf employees. It was a really good community effort from the people involved in the area we have our business in”

When the cooking was over and ticket sales were tallied, Knauf had raised approximately $2,000 for the six area elementary schools, Schmidt said. Businesses who bought tickets include C&C Fabrication, Riggers, Fabricators, Millrights Inc., Industrial Service and Supply, J. Smith Lanier & Co. and several others.

Schmidt reported that the amount of tickets sold and money raised for area students is something the company is proud of, not just because of where the money is going, but because of the community involvement that raised it in the first place. Knauf’s community involvement team expects to do many more events like these as time goes by.

“I started up the community involvement team and we have a really great group of people that are excited about these kinds of events,” Schmidt said. “All of these minds are coming together with great ideas of things we can do for the community and how we can make it better. I can definitely see us doing more events like these in the future.”