After Thursday, Thanksgiving Day was over and more than 1,600 meals were prepared and served to people in need in Clinton County with all credit going to those who gave their time and worked as volunteers at the Community Thanksgiving Meal.

Melissa Tallent, Coordinator of the No Kid Hungry Project, told the NEWS the Thanksgiving project gets better and better every year.

“I don’t know how much farther we can go,” Tallent said. “I feel that we were much more prepared this year. I mean we got it together and got it out.”

Tallent said the food and all the fixings lasted perfect this year and they fed the last people of the day and there wasn’t much turkey left.

“We packaged what we had left in zip-lock bags and gave it to the last group of people,” Tallent said. “I did have someone try to call me and we had missed them. We tried to deliver to this one location and we couldn’t find them. I think I know where this person is and I fixed another turkey and I’m going to take a meal to that person.”

Production and distribution of the meal, along with all the workers coming together, looked like a well oiled machine with all the moving parts working perfectly together to create one product. Tallent said she couldn’t have asked for it to go any better than it did.

“We ran out of desserts, but other than that it went really well,” Tallent said. “We had more people out delivering this year, so that left us with less people in the kitchen. We got done a lot sooner and we got the meals out, but no one was able to even move. We had a lot of help from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. but from 10:30 on we were a skeleton crew.”

Not counting delivery, Tallent said there could have been around 100 volunteers during the three day stretch.

Tallent said there was one person who has been there making every step she made this week and she couldn’t have done any of it without her help.

“Ms. Tammy Denney is fabulous,” Tallent said “Her and Kiley (Hoppe) really went above and beyond what was called for,” Tallent said.

Tallent also said there were several students who were itching to get into the flow of things and many of them she even told not to come in too early, but the students refused and came into work early in the morning instead of sleeping in on their day off from school.

“They told me if I was going to be there then they were going to be there,” Tallent said. “It’s an amazing feeling that these kids are giving of themselves and it also made me feel proud and feel that they had such a respect for what we are doing, but they also had respect for me. It goes beyond what we have in a classroom too. It was almost like they were overprotective of me. They were like if you are going to work them I’m going to work.”

Having this new connection that Tallent has with her students is something every teacher wants to accomplish as an educator. Tallent said this is just another tool they can use in life.

“I can’t teach this in the classroom,” Tallent said. “It made me see them in a different light than in the classroom. I see them not as a teacher and a student, but as young adults. They are not children … they are young adults. People say that our society doesn’t have the work ethic they use to, but I beg to differ 110 percent. Those who say that, those naysayers, they need to come and talk to these kids. They need to witness what these kids did and how hard they work. They got nothing out of it. They didn’t do it for a grade or for brownie points. They simply did it out of the goodness of their heart. I had one student walk up to me after it was over and they said ‘Ms. Tallent, I will never ever forget this experience and thank you for letting me work.’”

Tallent said she was floored when the student told her that.

“I said no, you don’t thank me, I thank you for working,” Tallent said.

Tallent said that only goes to the type of students she has at Clinton County High School.

“They are just an amazing, amazing, amazing bunch of kids,” Tallent said. “I can’t say that enough. I love them dearly and I will forever be in debt to them and if they ever need me I will be there for them.”

One volunteer for this year’s Thanksgiving Dinner was Levi Neathery. He said he has worked on the project since the beginning and it’s a blessing every year.

“Some people say its because they like helping people or some people say its because it makes them feel good, but I do it because it’s work and it needs to be done. That’s just the type of person I am,” Neathery said. “Before hand, I understood there were people who needed help, but I never dreamed there were that many people who worried about having a Thanksgiving meal or a meal on any day for that matter.”

Several other students were also on hand Monday to reflect on their participation Thursday. Zack Garmon said this was his first year helping with the project and it was an eye opener for him.

“I didn’t realize there were that many people who struggled each day,” Garmon said. “Last year I knew about it, but I didn’t help with it. I never really thought about it, but there is a lot of work that goes into it and it definitely needs to be done.”

Reagan Thrasher said it was a good experience for her as well.

“I enjoy helping people and it’s important that we do because they make us better people,” Thrasher said. “We realize that there are problems and we can help fix them.”

Carmen Rodriguez said many people just can’t afford to eat a good Thanksgiving meal and doing this project is a good way to help those people out.

“This was my first year doing this,” Rodriguez said. “We helped with everything. I didn’t figure there would be that many people.”

Sidney Dominguez agreed it was an eye opener for her as well.

“It was a good way to help out and help the community like that,” Dominguez said. “I think the fact we knew who it was going to made it more personal.”

Another first timer was Seanae York. She said it was a surprise to her as well that so many people in the county need help.

“There are so many people who need the hands on help instead of just giving money or doing stuff like that where we don’t get the full experience,” York said.

York also said it brought her closer together with other classmates during the experience.

“There are several people I haven’t talked to much, where now since we’ve been doing this I’m really close to them. It was a great experience,” York said.

Vivian Zheng said her experience was fulfilling.

“This is my second year doing this. It took a lot of team work and effort to put this together,” Zheng said. “I was tired, but I was really happy when I thought about how many people we reached. Sixteen hundred people got fed that day and normally they might not have had anything.”

Tallent said most of the people who received meals on Thanksgiving Day were people who needed the meal and according to the people who delivered the meal, those people were very grateful.

“I would like to thank Mrs. Tallent. Not from a student standpoint, but from person to person standpoint. This county and every where really, needs people who pitch in and sacrifice their time and who put forth this amount of effort to organize something like this,” Neathery said. “By the time its all said and done, it shouldn’t take a day like Thanksgiving or any holiday for that matter, to get the people in the county to put forth the effort. This is a problem they face everyday. We should all put forth the effort everyday to help these people.”

Students and adults joined forces last week to prepare, deliver and serve over 1,600 meals in Clinton County on Thanksgiving day. Above, the kitchen prep work resembled an assembly line Thursday while in the photo at left, Kent Shearer and Barry Thrasher worked to load prepared meals into the back of Shearer’s SUV to be delivered.