For ten years now, I’ve seen the canned food drive around school during November. However, as the years go by the meaning of the canned food drive is contorted into something that disappoints me.

     I’ve seen this more in high school than I had in middle school or elementary school, but the canned food drive is now no longer about helping families in need. It has become a game of how much extra credit students can get in their classes.

     In one of my classes we were offered the chance to bring in cans for extra credit and within a day the can count in that class tripled. I won’t pretend to be a saint and say I didn’t bring in cans because let’s be honest, anyone will do anything for extra credit, but I will say that after I brought in my cans, I realized just how much the point of the food drive has changed.

     Every school tries to entice the students into bringing in cans for their homeroom to win prizes like pizza or candy. However, these strategies were only efficient in elementary and middle school. I remember in 6th grade when every student bought in 50 cans just to beat the other classes. Granted, I was in a class where the teacher had won the competition every year for the past ten years or so, so every student was anxious to win the pizza party.

     That year for the drive, we went to neighborhoods that surrounded the school to ask for extra cans. While going door to door is time consuming and sometimes embarrassing, it’s definitely a lot better than going out to Winco or Costco and buying the most cans we could.

     In a sense, students are buying their grades. Let’s be honest here, students in high school don’t waste their time (which they would much rather spend on social networking sites or watching television) to go around asking for cans, nor do they seem likely to scrounge around in their cupboard to find cans they don’t use.

     As we grow older, the realization that we could just buy the amount of cans needed for extra credit surely saves us a lot of grief. Most teachers do tell students not to buy the cans, but what teachers don’t know won’t harm them right?

     The older the students get, the less meaningful the canned food drive becomes. Even the competition against our rival school doesn’t seem to interest the students.

     Now classes try every new way to convince students to bring in cans. P.E classes allow students to skip the mile or the fitness run if they’re able to bring in cans. Teachers offer extra credit for cans being brought in. Student government entered students who brought one can to the bonfire rally into a raffle.

     Students no longer bring in cans because they want to feed the helpless families; they bring in cans to boost their grade in any possible way. I can’t possibly judge students who bring in cans for a reward, because I have done the same, but it does disappoint me that our canned food drive has shifted from a selfless cause to a selfish one.