LEMOORE, Calif. – Staff and students at the Center for Naval Aviation Technical Training Unit (CNATTU) Lemoore lent a helping hand for local families preparing to send their children back to school.

Tasks such as shopping for clothes, transportation, packing lunches and buying school supplies can sometimes be overwhelming, especially for military families with some parents out on detachments or deployment. CNATTU Lemoore pitched in to help lighten the load by distributing school supplies via the Operation Homefront’s “Back-to-School Brigade” program.

The “Back-to-School Brigade” program is an annual nationwide school supply collection and distribution campaign that has been servicing military families for 12 years. CNATTU Lemoore has participated in this program and has called it the “Backpack Brigade,” where it has distributed school supplies to more than 600 families throughout the local communities for the past three years.

This year’s effort seemed extra special for families, particularly for students who are thrilled to return to school campuses. CNATTU Lemoore’s Operation Homefront volunteer coordinator Aviation Electrician’s Mate First Class Cory Davis, who has a passion for helping the local communities, coordinated teams of volunteers in sorting, staging, and handing out school supplies.

“It was a great opportunity to be able to help the community and to see the kids’ faces light up as they picked out their school supplies,” Davis said. “This event was for families in the area and I’m thankful that we had the opportunity to help them out.”

In order to arrange and coordinate an event such as this is no easy feat. CNATTU Sailors and Marines went to work on gathering and sorting 500 medium-sized boxes full of folders, binders, note books, glue sticks, crayons, colored pencils, pencils, pens, calculators, rulers, protractors, paper, erasers, highlighters, flash cards, scissors, and 100 backpacks. Under Davis’ leadership, the teams of volunteers successfully issued out 100 prefilled backpacks and school supplies to 188 families.