A blowout of a section

Hello, neighbors! I hope everyone is having a good week. If may have noticed there’s a lot of photos in this week’s Lee County Neighbors. I refer to it as one of our occasional “blowout” editions.

Let me explain:

The number of pages in the Neighbors section is determined by the amount of advertising sold for it. We have a weekly goal to devote a certain amount of space in the section to advertising. We try to meet or exceed that goal number each week.

However, there are times when we have to sacrifice that weekly goal. That’s especially true when we receive an overwhelming number of photos and information, creating a backlog. As of this week, the backlog exceeded 100 photos.

In order to get most of those photos in, we have to “blow out” the section (increase the number of pages). We fail to meet the weekly goal, but we get in a lot of photos readers have submitted and want to see in a timely manner.

This week’s section helped relieve the backlog, but I think another blowout section might help even more.

Walking for St. Jude

Seems like this is turning into a Shannon Primary School blog, but that’s OK. I enjoy visiting the school and I appreciate it inviting me to special occasions like what you’re about to see.

This is a videoclip from its walk on Thursday, May 1 benefitting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. The students and staff collect pennies – a lot of them, in fact – and donate it to St. Jude. This year they raised $1,011.66!

The clip is from the opening ceremony when a group of balloons were released. The child who helps counselor Sandi Mallary release the balloons is Andrew Benson, a kindergarten student who underwent chemotherapy treatments at St. Jude when he was 2 years old. His grandmother was at the walk, and she said Andrew celebrated his third birthday at St. Jude. Andrew is doing well, even showing me the scar on his belly where he received his treatments.