Woodland students help schools in West Africa

McKenna Brown, 14, an eighth-grader at Woodland School in Ladera, recently organized two drives to collect classroom materials for schools in Equatorial Guinea in West Africa.

More than 100 Woodland students donated or helped pack donations from the school community.

McKenna then took her project a step further and asked her aunt, Margaret Watson, a third-grade teacher at Sandpiper School in Redwood Shores, for more help. A total of 225 pounds of school supplies, such as notebooks, rulers and pens, were shipped.

Fifty pounds of school supplies that could not be sent into Equatorial Guinea were donated to Selby Lane School in the Redwood City School District.

The drives were part of McKenna’s eighth-grade Capstone Project, where students research a topic of local and global significance and present their findings to the school community.

As part of her year-long project, McKenna decided to help Equatorial Guinea, where about 50 percent of primary school-age children do not attend school, partially because they can’t afford school supplies.