FREEPORT

After Hurricane Sandy mauled towns and schools in their counterpart of Freeport, N.Y., a group of students and faculty here mobilized to get the students there what they need to get back to class.

Like our Freeport, Freeport, N.Y. — a town of almost 44,000 located 21 miles east of New York City in Long Island’s Nassau County — got its name during colonial times because it did not charge customs fees to ships that docked there to unload cargo.

Also like our Freeport, it faces the Atlantic — but without the natural barrier islands and reaches that dot Mid-coast Maine.

Relatively unguarded, Sandy’s towering storm surge and high winds obliterated the Freeport, N.Y., school and its stores of supplies.

When Abigial Smith, a Freeport High School senior, read that students in the coastal Long Island suburb were returning to school — but largely without classroom basics such as markers, pens, pencils, notebooks, binders, crayons and other necessities — she decided to rally her friends and classmates.

Along with Dede Bennell, the service learning and aspirations director at Freeport High School here, Smith has spent lunch periods at schools around town, speaking to students and pitching for donations.

Ultimately, the students aim to fill a van or movingtruck sized vehicle with goodies by Dec. 20 and deliver it to New York in early January.

Other students in the Service Learning Program and the Interact Club, a student affiliate of Rotary International, have taken on logistics of the trip’s planning, Bennell said.

“Collection is the easy part,” Bennell said. “We want to make the trip ourselves, maybe in one of the school’s vans. But they’re figuring out the cost of the trip: distance, mileage, how much fuel will be needed, what it will cost for lodging and meals, van rental if we don’t take our own, all those other things that are needed to make the trip.”

A meeting is scheduled for Friday’s lunch period, at 11:20 a.m., to hand out the planning assignments to students.

Meanwhile, other kids are canvasing local businesses to solicit donations of goods. Posters have been made and hung, blast emails have been sent to the Regional School Unit 5 mailing list.

“We’ve already received quite a few donations,” Bennell said.

The goods are being staged outside her office at the high school and in boxes at the Freeport Community Center on Depot Street.

For more information or to make a donation, contact Freeport High School at 865- 4706 or email bennelld@rsu5.org.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com