By Kathleen Acuff

LAHS students collect, weigh and organize more than five tons of food for Second Harvest Food Bank.

On Nov. 22 a dozen or so Los Altos High School students spent their brunch break helping Assistant Principal Cristy Dawson weigh nonperishable food and beverages and place the goods - carefully, the heavy things on the bottom and the fragile things on top - into large barrels in the cafeteria. The whole school had collected canned, bottled, bagged and boxed foodstuffs for seven days for the good of the community and in the hope of beating the socks off rival Mountain View High. They did. The final score was Los Altos 15,850 pounds, Mountain View 2,600.

Schools participating in the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District’s annual Thanksgiving food drive had striven to reach the districtwide goal of 15,000 pounds of food for disadvantaged people in Santa Clara County.

Students at Alta Vista, the district’s small continuation high school, found time to get in the game, too. They collected the equivalent of four barrels’ worth of food for Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties over a 10-day period. The leadership class, taught by Wendy Dowling, headed up the effort for a student body with family and work responsibilities. Alta Vista students plan to follow up with another food drive for Christmas.

This has been a year of disasters that changed the geography of the planet: the tsunami that swallowed islands and coastal towns of the Indian Ocean, the drowning of New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina and the deadly earthquake in Pakistan. What motivated local teens to do so much after all the charity drives they have participated in over the past 12 months?

The desire to help those less fortunate played a role, but it was the spirit of competition that made the difference, Dawson and Mountain View High Assistant Principal Matt Neely said. One look at the Los Altos High students and teachers rushing up to the cafeteria table with armfuls of edibles to weigh on the white bathroom scale seemed to bear out that claim.

Neely said staff at Mountain View High appealed to students’ service ethic, but “a little

competition with their sister school” didn’t hurt. “We kept telling them how Los Altos was doing, and that may have helped a bit,” he said.

A rented truck in the middle of the Mountain View quad served as publicity and a reminder. Last Tuesday, Neely delivered one and a half tons’ worth of assistance to the Community Services Agency, which serves Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Mountain View.

At Los Altos High, competition was hot even between classrooms. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, physics teacher Adam Randall said his second period class had brought in more than $30 daily for the past six days, sending him to buy canned goods and other food.

Dawson said the entire school was involved in the effort. “Some of the poor kids who get free lunch brought in food for others every day,” she said.

The Los Altos High students outperformed their 2004 effort - 6,300 pounds - by a factor of two and a half.

Administrators at Los Altos High had offered pizza parties for the four classrooms at the top of the heap, but Dawson freely acknowledged that that was hardly the incentive for the teens. “It was the spirit of the individual classes. They were competitive in a good way - it was very enjoyable,” she said.

Last Wednesday, with everything that had come in so far at Los Altos High weighed and stashed, Dawson reported that three classrooms had each collected more than a ton of comestibles: Robert Freeman’s senior advanced-placement economics class (2,673 pounds), Randall’s physics class (2,106 pounds) and Suzanna Herrera’s American literature class (2,077 pounds).

“We sent 53 barrels yesterday,” Dawson said the day before Thanksgiving. “Things will keep coming in, and we’ll end up sending another 12-13 barrels.”

Students and faculty were elated by their success. “Oh, we’re so happy,” Dawson said. “I was telling the kids, I saw on the news last night that food banks’ supplies are depleted.”