The freshman class at Sedona Red Rock High School beat out the rest of the student body in the Interact Club’s competitive food drive collection during the week of Nov. 17, completely filling its barrel of donations on Friday, Nov. 21.

The barrels were all emptied before each day. Up until the last day, the freshmen and seniors were neck and neck.

While the Sedona Community Food Bank will later weigh the food and let the Interact Club know exactly how much food was brought in, club members counted the boxes before donating.

“We brought in over 200 items!” Interact Club faculty advisor Teresa Lamparter wrote in an email after the drive. She added that the Rotary Club of Sedona Village sponsored the freshmen’s celebratory doughnut party.

“We’ve had it for a couple of years, and it’s gone really well,” Lamparter said. “It’s a little slow the first day or two, but then the kids all get competitive, because I announce who’s in the lead.”

Freshman Alex Cutler said “the competition between classes” was the most fun part of the drive.

The club is pretty large, Lamparter said, averaging about 45 to 55 students per year, though this year there’s only 40 members.

Throughout the week, the students were getting the word out to their classmates about the drive.

“Making signs, promoting it,” club president and senior Lily Williams said about the club leadership’s role throughout the week. “Obviously collecting food, counting it, sorting it.”

Williams said she was a little surprised at the amount of macaroni and cheese boxes, one of the most common donations.

To Interact students, this is just another week of civic action; with the large membership, students can fill out sign-up sheets for just about any event.

“Just today, I had all the clipboards of what’s coming up,” Lamparter said after her meeting with the students on Nov. 4.

“We’re volunteering with Fest of Fall on Saturday. And I’m like, ‘OK, if you can sign up for that, sign up for that.’ We’re doing Sedona Winds on the 16th. … We do school paper recycling. So we recycled paper every other Friday; we go to all the classrooms to get all the paper. They sign up for that.”

The students don’t have to sign up for everything, but many of them sign up for something to do most weeks.

“I really like the Wildcat Carnival,” junior Dayanna Landaverde said. “Just being there with the kids and seeing them have fun.”

The annual West Sedona School fundraising carnival was one of the club’s biggest volunteer events of the year.

“I made it three different shifts,” Lamparter said. “And they showed up for their shifts. I mean, I had it like 10:30-12:30, 12:30-2:30, 2:30-4:30.”

She keeps an extensive spreadsheet to log all of the volunteer hours each student completes.

“I’m the scholarship coordinator for the campus,” she said. “When they do their resumes and they apply for scholarships, I’ve got their hours from freshman to senior year.”

Lamparter advertises the Interact Club heavily from early on in the students’ time at the high school to attract new members.

“She always hypes of the Interact Club very well,” Williams said. “She’s always playing loud Justin Bieber. The same four songs.”

After the club’s meeting during the lunch period on Nov. 21, Lamparter picked up her mobile speaker and began playing Bieber’s song “Baby.”

Williams, a senior who’s been volunteering throughout her four years of high school, said she really likes to see everyone who she volunteers for, whether that’s the food drive, Sedona Winds events or the carnival.

“If they’re really young they get super-excited and if they’re really old, they get super-excited,” she said. “It just makes them so excited, like when we go Christmas caroling” in December.

Much of the club began volunteering while they were still in middle school, which often volunteers with Humane Society Sedona, Cutler said