Cascade High School continues food drive tradition

Published 5:20 pm Friday, December 19, 2025

EVERETT — Cascade High School wouldn’t be the same without it.

Every year, students across the entire school spend months preparing for a massive food donation drive, collecting food to be donated to hundreds of local families. The tradition stretches all the way back to the first year the south Everett high school opened in 1961.

More than six decades later, it’s still going strong, as students spent the week collecting and organizing tens of thousands of donated food items before delivering them to hundreds of families throughout the community. Students had collected over 51,000 cans of food and 1,100 to distribute to locals, along with over $19,000 in monetary donations to give to charity.

Almost everybody in the school of more than 1,600 students has a hand in making the food drive successful, said Kelly Rogers, an ASB and leadership teacher at the high school.

“There’s not a single class that doesn’t participate,” Rogers said Wednesday.

The work starts all the way back in October, she said. Students in the leadership class start reaching out to local grocery stores, asking where they may be able to station students to ask for donations of food or funds. Classrooms begin working on logistics of how they will collect and sort food donations from students.

Then, as the holidays get closer, students start asking for food donations at grocery stores — what they call “going canning.” Other students get stationed in the library to wrap donated gifts. Once the event is ready to roll, dozens of students flood into the school’s gymnasium to pack boxes full of food to distribute. About 100 students are sent into the community to hand-deliver the food to families in need, who are by selected by Volunteers of America Western Washington and the Salvation Army.

“I think it would be different if it were just the kids who are receiving really great grades, or are in leadership classes or all those things. But it really is everyone,” Cascade High School Principal Michael Takayoshi said. “… It’s a large group of kids, and they take it really seriously.”

Leadership students spent the day Wednesday preparing boxes to be filled with donated food in the gymnasium. Stacks of cereal boxes, canned foods, pasta, rice, oatmeal and more reached so high into the air that they blocked the view from one isle to another.

Naomy Basilio, 17, the senior class president, started helping with the food drive in her sophomore year at Cascade. She said she enjoyed working together with other students to put together this massive undertaking for families in the community, and that it makes a difference that students deliver the donations to families themselves.

“I feel like it really shows the families how much we care,” said 17-year-old Naomy Basilio. “It shows how important it is to us, that we would try our hardest to drive the food to them.”

Families get one box of food for every person in their family, plus three extra boxes. There’s so much food left over, even after all the boxes are distributed, that the school donated almost two dozen bins filled with food to Volunteers of America Western Washington.

“It shows what a school community of teenagers can do,” Takayoshi said. “A lot of the time, I think teenagers get thought of a certain way within society, and I think you need to look at the impact and the importance. They’re really impacting people’s lives in positive ways.”

Takayoshi said there’s another benefit to the food drive: bringing the school community together under one purpose to contribute to something larger than themselves.

“I think the food drive is honestly the one tradition at Cascade that has continued regardless of what has been going on,” said Rogers, who attended Cascade as a student before becoming a teacher there. “… It’s kind of this institution of its own. It’s what we do as Bruins, we serve our community.”

Other high schools across Everett Public Schools also took part in holiday donation drives, according to the district. Everett High School collected more than 500 gifts to distribute to local families. Jackson High School gave more than 5,000 pounds of food to a local food bank and more than 700 toys to Mill Creek elementary schools. And Sequoia High School collected over 400 items for a student food, hygiene and clothing pantry at the high school.

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.