Volunteer group gives away school supplies for National Guard troops
With the average price of a child’s school supplies topping $100 this year, hundreds of local military families are getting help from the communities they serve.
The sons and daughters of the approximately 800 U.S. Army National Guard soldiers stationed out of Rock Hill are picking up donated school supplies with their parents this weekend.
Those supplies have been donated by local businesses, individuals and chain stores like Dollar Tree, and distributed to local military families who need them.
“We can help them save some money,” says Anne Cash, the volunteer-leader of the 178th Combat Engineers Battalion Family Readiness Group. “They can put that money that they would have put into school supplies somewhere else.”
The readiness group, or FRG in military lingo, serves as an all-volunteer backbone to the reserve detachment working out of the armory near the Rock Hill airport. When 161 of those soldiers deployed in 2012 for a nine-month mission in Afghanistan, Cash and her team helped send them off with pride.
And when all 161 soldiers returned in May of 2014 — in one piece, mind you — Cash and the FRG welcomed them home inside a giant private air terminal in Columbia with a Welcome Home bash a few months later at the Winthrop Coliseum.
Cash, who is not related to anyone in the battalion, says she’s often asked by reporters which service member is her son or daughter.
“All of them,” she replies. “They all are.”