For the past four years, Hillside Elementary School’s kindergarten class has participated in Open Door Mission’s annual Diaper Drive as part of their own Be Kind movement, in which they do activities to demonstrate kindness each month. In this year’s Diaper Drive, from Dec. 3 to Dec. 14, they were able to collect 4,494 diapers to add to Open Door Mission’s goal of one million in total. The three kindergarten instructors, Jill Foster, Stephanie Barker and Crystal Shirkey, took over the Diaper Drive when instructor Kim Young, who started the program, left Hillside. 

Foster said the teachers also heard about the idea on the radio station 96.1, and they already knew it was with the Open Door Mission. Due to this and Young’s involvement in years past, they decided to take on what was once an all-school activity and apply it strictly to the kindergarteners. Despite the students being young, Barker said the kids are still making a big change through the Diaper Drive. 

“They’re so young and have such big hearts,” Barker said. “They’re ready to help anyway they can. Last year, due to all the flooding, along with the diaper drive, we did a toy drive. So, those went hand in hand just to help kids in the community.” 

At the beginning of the Diaper Drive, Foster, Barker and Shirkey asked a director from Open Door Mission to come talk to the students about what the Diaper drive means. During this presentation, Foster and Barker said the director tried to explain the purpose of the drive in a way that the kindergarteners could understand. She explained that some people do not have some of the necessities that the students might, and the Diaper Drive would help to provide just one item that many families need. 

Having an Open Door Mission representative come in and speak got the students to see how their donations could make a difference in their communities, according to Foster. They took this information home, along with emails and newsletters from each instructor, and then the diapers started to come in. 

“Some years are better than others, and it just depends on your classroom,” Foster said. “Some years we’ve had almost a donation from every single kid and some years not. But we never peg them out and say, ‘You didn’t bring diapers.’ We just say, ‘Look at how many diapers we have.’”

In the first year of doing the Diaper Drive, Hillside kindergarteners raised between 2,000 and 3,000 diapers. Last year, they raised nearly 7,000 diapers, according to Foster. 

In an attempt to bring in more donations from the students, Barker, Foster and Shirkey said they decided to make the Diaper Drive into a competition between the three classrooms. With each box or package of diapers that came in from students, the instructors added up the total amount of individual diapers and shared it with the class. The goal in doing this was to get the students to bring in more diapers so their class could be in the lead. 

Barker said she had a few students come up to her occasionally to tell her that they had more diapers than one of the other classes. Making it into a competition helped to bring together the students in improving their community.

“I mean, they know that we are all in it together, and we’re providing for kids in need and families in need, but it’s just fun to get involved,” Barker said. “I did have one kid ask, ‘What do we get for winning?’ My assistant said the kids that we are helping get the prize.”

Other than the Diaper Drive, the kindergarteners do other activities each month in honor of Be Kind. Barker said some of the activities include donating to the food pantry down the street, holding a toy drive or doing something kind for staff members or classmates. 

“We started [Be Kind activities] about three years ago,” Foster said. “In kindergarten, we had decided we were going to work on being kind, so every month we would do something kind, whether it was towards ourselves or towards our school … We would just pick something.”

Barker said it’s not just about collecting items, like diapers, it’s about helping to improve the kids as students and members of their community. They do these other activities because it’s not always easy for each family to donate something, so doing these separate activities gives everyone the chance to participate, according to Foster. 

Barker said doing the Diaper Drive each year has helped the parents get an idea of when it will be going on. She has had parents ask about the Diaper Drive and even start stocking up on diapers when they go on sale, so they’re ready to go for the drive. 

To close up their Diaper Drive each year, all the students wear a shirt that the instructors make for their Be Kind day each month. They all gather in one room and take a photo with all the diapers they gathered. Then, each student grabs a package and loads it in the car. These diapers are taken to an Open Door Mission donation spot to be put in a warehouse for a future date when they are needed. 

Barker said her overall goal is that the students will take the feeling of helping their community with them in their future. 

 “I’d thought about this years ago,” Barker said. “I sent a letter to moms and dads saying, ‘We can learn how to read or we can learn how to write or do math, but what the world really needs is kindness and acceptance.’ They’re going to learn to read sometimes, and of course we will still do our academics, but just to have a big heart, compassion and empathy for people, that I think is what would make kindergarten important.”