Anyone can make an impact in our community and the students at the Community School of Davidson are a prime example. 

During the early days of December, the sophomores at CSD (‘25 graduates) spent four Civics classes listening to a variety of speakers. Each was an engaged citizen of Davidson who impacted our community in some positive way. 

Karen Toney, the owner of  Ben & Jerry’s on Main Street, came in to speak on the first day, Tuesday the sixth. While she spoke, she mentioned the donation box in her shop for Odd Sock, an organization dedicated to collecting socks for homeless shelters. In the colder months, socks are the single most requested article of clothing, and there is often a lack of them. Odd Sock’s original pitch was to collect the ‘odd sock’ that had lost its pair and was laying around someone’s house but now has morphed into gathering both new and used socks. 

During the fourth-period class, she proposed the idea of a drop box at CSD. The students were mute to the suggestion at the beginning but after Toney elaborated, student Logan Cain (‘25) and interim Civics teacher and a previous Davidson board member, Connie Wessner, jumped on the idea. 

Wessner put forward the concept of a school-wide competition to see who could collect the most socks for Odd Sock. Both the students and Toney loved the thought. They mulled over and changed the idea several times before it was finalized. The competition would be between the forty-two advisories at CSD, each challenged to collect the most socks possible with the winner receiving a certificate for an ice cream party at Ben & Jerry’s.

CSD advisories are composed of a group of high school students and a teacher who meet every Wednesday for lunch and one Friday a month they go out into the community to serve. Some aid various nonprofits for the homeless and disadvantaged, others go to parks to clean trash and still others stay at CSD to help out around the school.

With the idea settled, that night the administration sent out a message via Schoology to all parents and students of CDS detailing the concept of the sock drive. The next day, Cain and student, Logan DuBois (‘25), spent their advisory lunch passing out large paper lawn bags and a sheet with the printed information of the drive to every advisory.

The sock drive ran for nine days, from Wednesday the seventh to Friday the sixteenth. Once it had concluded the bags were collected and brought to the Civics classroom where over the course of the next few school days the fourth-period class counted them. The final tally totaled 3,439 socks, a stunning amount collected in only seven school days.

Matt Glass’s advisory came out on top of forty-two advisories with two of the nineteen lawn bags filled. Along with their victory, Tony presented them with their ice cream certificate. 

Wessner felt that the students of the fourth-period class also deserved a reward. On December 19, Toney came back into CSD with a sundae cart and an ice cream party was thrown for the students who made the whole sock drive materialize.

In the beginning of the New Year, January 20th, Katie Beamer and Shannon Vacchiarello’s advisories spent their service Friday organizing and loading the socks to be distributed out to local homeless shelters. 

A month and a half in the running and what started as a brainstorming idea materialized into a fully realized project. A few students exemplified the notion that anybody can make an impact.