STORY: Age Is Just a Number for La Jolla Students Supporting L.A. County Fire Evacuees and First Responders

SAN DIEGO -- People of all ages in La Jolla are getting involved in supporting wildfire evacuees in Los Angeles County.
In the past week, students at La Jolla High, Muirlands Middle, La Jolla Elementary and La Jolla Country Day schools have kicked off initiatives to send relief and otherwise show support to fire victims and first responders.
La Jolla High and Muirlands found an opportunity to collaborate, and after starting Jan. 14, the schools are collecting donations through Friday, Feb. 7.
At La Jolla High, the initiative started as a partnership between its Associated Student Body, or ASB, and the school’s Interact Club. The fires hit close for the presidents of both groups.
Junior Maggie Hou, president of the Interact Club, found out a close friend’s home was lost to the fires. Senior Olivia Smith, the ASB president, knows someone in Santa Monica who was evacuated.
“You don’t realize how much it really affects people … until it’s like your family members or it’s your close friends that are losing things,” Smith said. “And we just wanted to find ways that we can reach out and help those communities and help rebuild in times of intense distress right now.”
Smith reached out to the adjacent Muirlands Middle School about fielding donations at both campuses.
La Jolla Youth Baseball got involved, too, hoping to send aid to leagues in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
Hou asked La Jolla High Associate Principal Joe Cavaiola about how the Interact Club could get involved, and he directed her to ASB. A connection between the club and The Salvation Army provided the group a place to send donations.
Hou asked The Salvation Army to identify its greatest areas of need. In addition to clothes and food, the organization asked for donations for its Door of Hope program of hygiene items such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, floss and toilet paper, as well as suitcases and backpacks for people who had to evacuate their homes.
“We’re going to try to focus on those specific things for our donation drive because I feel like it will be more effective and more impactful if we focus on a specific thing that we want students to bring in,” Hou said. “Even though everything is helpful … these are some things that we just want to highlight.”
To help transport the donations, MI-Box, a moving and mobile storage company, donated a container for the items that Muirlands and La Jolla High collect. The La Jolla Elementary School Student Advisory Council offered to help sort them and identify each category.
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