At the start of a new school year, you can never have too many No. 2 pencils, sharpened to a crisp point.

For a fifth-grade classroom at Buchanan Elementary School in the School District of Lancaster, they won’t ever be short of pencils this year.

RETTEW’s headquarters office in Lancaster, PA spends time throughout the year raising funds to support the local community.

In 2017, our staff partnered with a local teacher, Ms. Chillot, to make sure her students had all the supplies they needed to start the school year off right.

Data collected in 2015 for the School District of Lancaster, which includes students from Lancaster City and Lancaster Township, shows 88 percent of students are considered economically disadvantaged. Many schools and teachers provide all school supplies in the classroom, so families do not have to purchase those items. But the supplies might be coming out of the teacher’s own pocket, not necessarily the district’s budget.

RETTEW’s partnership meant needed school supplies are stocked in a classroom of around 25 students. And not only supplies for students (an entire box of erasers!), but also needed classroom items: Clorox wipes, tissues, and whiteboard markers.

We take our jobs to engineer the infrastructure and communities of today and tomorrow seriously, and we also invest just as much effort into our local communities. Led by RETTEW employees, we’re proud of our staff’s efforts like this all over the U.S.!