LUDLOW — As students across Holyoke prepare for a new school year, the Holyoke Safe Neighborhood Initiative will be handing out 2,000 backpacks filled with supplies to the city’s schoolchildren.
Unable to distribute the supplies at its traditional back-to-school event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Holyoke Safe Neighborhood Initiative will instead hold 11 individual “grab-and-go” events at schools across Holyoke beginning this week and lasting until school begins in September. Dates and times for those events will be communicated to families by the individual schools as they are finalized, said Edward Caisse of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, the director of the Holyoke Safe Neighborhood Initiative, which is overseen by the sheriff’s department.
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State Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, said that the supplies in the backpacks are “absolutely critical.”
“This right here, these books, these backpacks, this education, this is the key — this is the foundation to everything,” Velis said. “If you have an educated population … anything is possible.”