The location changed and the manner of serving changed due to COVID-19 safety measures, however, some things remained the same at the Lennox Sundstrom FFA pancake feed.
FFA members served up fresh pancakes and sausages, and the community turned out to support families in need.
Ag teacher Brady Duxbury was apprehensive about how a drive-thru pancake feed would go or if anyone would show up. He did not need to worry.
“People came. We were steady the entire time. When we were busy, we were really busy,” Duxbury said. “We ended up raising some amazing funds. It was incredible because of how difficult everything was and how different everything was.”
The chapter began planning for the pancake feed in December. They had asked the district if they could hold one and were told no. They went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea to do a drive-thru, which the school supported fully.
Once a drive-thru was accepted, the chapter began looking at how traffic flow would work at their traditional site of the intermediate school. With better traffic flow at the high school, they decided to change their location.
“For car flow purposes, that just made more sense,” he said.
Chapter president Kayleigh Thill said normally the pancake feed is a social event as well as a fundraiser. However, with COVID the social part was minimized to just FFA members taking orders at car windows and making deliveries.
“It was nice to see the community pull together even though we did it a little bit differently,” Thill said.
Every year the FFA chapter, votes on who or what to donate the funds raised from the pancake feed. This year they decided to raise funds for intermediate school teacher and wrestling coach Blake Crosby and former elementary teacher Tara Drake. Both teachers have infants with medical issues.
Thill said they had about 180 cars come through the drive-thru. It stayed busy during the feed.
“We had some people give some very generous donations and some people didn’t even want anything, they just wanted to support the families,” Thill said.
They raised more than $6,500 to be given to the families. Thankfully businesses and parents stepped up to cover all of the expenses so all of the money donated by the community will go to the families. They were also thankful to the Worthing and Lennox fire departments for the use of their griddles.
“The amount of support was incredible and very neat and really appreciated,” Duxbury said.
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