PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A friendly competition between a fourth grade class in Philadelphia and a fifth grade class in Kansas City is using Super Bowl LVII as a jumping-off point to learn about food insecurity and to help their communities.
It all started with a call for help from a Kansas City fifth grade teacher in a national Facebook group for The Global Read-Aloud. And Greene Street Friends fourth grade teacher Julia Copeland answered the call.
“Someone posted recently: Hey, I'm in Kansas City and looking for a teacher in Philadelphia who might be willing to do this project with us. And I was like: ‘I'm from Philadelphia.’”
Copeland connected with a fifth grade teacher in Kansas City whose students have been studying hunger and food insecurity. Together they planned their own “Soup-er Bowl” match-up.
“Like a collection of soup for the week leading up to the Super Bowl,” Copeland said.
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The two classrooms have been in touch this week to see which one can collect more cans of soup before the big game.
“We've zoomed with them. We've been sharing our totals every day,” Copeland said.
Each day, after they count their cans, the Philly students place them in a community pantry outside the school founded by Jane Ellis, Greene Street’s middle school dean.
“The food goes very, very quickly. A lot of people, actually, would be surprised to hear the fridge in the pantry empty a lot of the time. It's just getting constantly filled and constantly emptied, because the need is really, really high,” Ellis said.
“It really means a lot that they are interacting in a way that’s meaningful and they want to be part of the process of keeping the fridge filled for their community members here in Germantown.”
Students say the project has been eye-opening. “I mean, I knew that there are homeless people who needed food, but I didn't really realize it that much,” said Penelope Bryan.
Liberty Maida-Hartranft, age 9, said, “I have learned that there's like a lot more people in Philly than I thought there were that were in need of food.”
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So far, Copeland said, the Kansas City class is winning the Soup-er Bowl. Philadelphia, ever the underdog.
“Their school is a little bit bigger than ours,” she said.
“But we think that maybe this might mean that we actually get to win the real Super Bowl.”