Menchville High School culminated this year’s Lead to Feed Project by participating in Canstructure at Patrick Henry Mall on Saturday. The Menchville team was awarded a trophy for “Most Cans Collected” and tied for 2nd place for “Best Structure.”
During the Canstructure event, teams of students design and build a structure related to a theme. This year’s theme was “Back to the Future” and the Menchville structure – designed by Michelle Wiatt’s art class– was built using about 1200 of the 5100 cans MHS students have collected during the year. Morgan Flint’s art classes created the paper mache planets that orbited the rocket ship-shaped structure.
Twelve Peninsula high schools participated in the competition and the 20,000 cans collected were presented to the Peninsula Food Bank.

The Menchville Canstructure building team consisted of students from the Menchville’s Governor’s Youth Development Academy: Marli Peters, Tayla Bryan, Sarah Howell, Javier Rodriguez, Ti’onne Debnam and Akira Brown. The faculty sponsor was Jason Hollar.

The can collection started in September, when Menchville’s Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) involved the entire school in the national Lead to Feed program. This program is sponsored by Yum!, Brand Inc. and encourages participating schools to focus on a year-long project that develops student leaders and raises awareness of hunger in the community. Homeroom groups and clubs collected cans and donations all year long, through a variety of outreach projects. All of these small projects combined to collect the astounding number of cans that have been taken to the Food Bank this year. “It’s pretty amazing,” said Menchville activity director Pete Mercier. “Menchville provided 25% of the total cans collected by the twelve schools that participated.”

The Canstructure Competition is organized by the Youth Volunteer Corps and sponsored by Patrick Henry Mall.