Ridgefield students participate in nationwide sock drive

Ridgefield — Students from Stephanie Brown’s class at Union Ridge Elementary in the Ridgefield School District spent the last month collecting socks for Socktober, a nationwide movement to collect socks for homeless shelters. Brown’s students were collecting the socks for the Council for the Homeless in Vancouver. Their goal was to collect 1,000 pairs of socks, which they nearly doubled. The drive collected 1,972 pairs of socks. Many of the students in the Reaching Independence through Structured Education program are on the autism spectrum, and the students ran every element of the program. They visited each classroom in the school to place donation bags and say a few words about the drive. Every day, the students walked around school with a wagon to collect donations, which they sorted, charted and tracked.