Katherine Jacobi ’21, Student Reporter

For the last several holiday seasons, Mckinney North, McKinney Boyd, and McKinney High all contribute to an event called “Mactown Miracles”. The goal of this collaboration is to provide a holiday meal for the less fortunate families in Mckinney. This year, the Mckinney North High School student council sponsor, Sarah Adams, hoped to feed more families than they usually do. To meet this goal, Adams and her co-sponsor, Megan Dunn, created and sold a Mactown Miracle t-shirt and used the profits to buy turkeys needed to feed additional families. Furthermore, several McKinney elementary and middle schools joined the effort and raised funds and collected food donations. Student representatives from all three high schools stood outside of McKinney grocery stores in order to collect food and monetary donations from the community. It turned into a city-wide event where many contributed towards feeding local families. 

A lot of hard work went into making this event happen. The donations had to be counted and organized to make sure there would be enough for each family. When it came time to assemble the meals, the MNHS StuCo realized they were well over their goal, so they decided to use the extra supplies to make “Holiday Meal Starter Kits”, which included all of the same items as the normal bags minus the turkey. Extra items that did not go into the meals or starter kits were donated to a food pantry so more people could be helped. This year, 825 families were provided with a holiday meal, and 300 additional families were given a holiday meal starter kit; a significant increase from previous years.

On the final day of Mactown Miracles, students from all three McKinney high schools came  together at MNHS to pack all the bags and load them onto trucks or into cars to be delivered to  their designated organization where they will be given to a family. To stuff the bags with groceries, all the donations were organized in the cafeteria and an assembly line was created where a “runner” walks down the aisle while other people manning the tables put the right amount of food items in the bag. A timer was set and another Mactown Miracles record was broken; it only took the volunteers 15:27 minutes to stuff the 1,125 bags! Years ago the Student Council at McKinney North started Mactown Miracles and have watched it grow substantially over time. They hope to maintain this trajectory so that they can continue to feed even more families in the years to come.