SaddleBrooke Community Outreach Gets Kids School Ready with Backpack and Supplies | Community

If you have been around children in the last 30 years, you know that backpacks are an essential item for school—holding books, school supplies, paper and perhaps a few gummy bears.

For the last 13 years, the SaddleBrooke Community Outreach (SBCO) has partnered with local schools to provide backpacks filled with school supplies to children in kindergarten through sixth grade.

At the end of each school year, the schools supply an estimate of next year’s enrollment along with a list of required school supplies, such as pencils, scissors, crayons and paper. Linda Kehr, a SaddleBrooke resident assembles the lists and submits an order to an online company that takes charge of loading the backpacks with the requested school supplies and then delivering them to the schools in time for Back-to-School Night in early August.

Currently, the program serves six schools in the Copper Corridor (towns from Catalina to Miami), supplying 1,372 backpacks for the 2025 to 2026 school year. Children in this economically deprived area are assured of being equipped with necessary school supplies and a backpack to keep track of them as well as a myriad of school papers, books and homework assignments.

Funding for the backpack program, along with other SBCO programs like Kids’ Closet and Teen Closet, is provided by donations from individuals and local businesses and proceeds from sales at the Golden Goose Thrift Shop. All of these sources allow SBCO’s programs to feed, clothe, enrich and educate local children in schools where 40 to 98 percent of the students come from low-income families.