Haggen matching donations for local schools

First graders in Robin Ebenal-Thompson’s first grade class at Blaine Primary School controlling a robotic ball with tablet computers.

By Oliver Lazenby

Haggen is collecting and matching donations for local schools until Tuesday, January 30. Customers can donate in $1, $5 and $10 increments at any Haggen cash register and Haggen will match donations up to $20,000.

The Bellingham-based grocer’s semi-annual fundraising drive, which started on January 17, is a partnership with donorschoose.org, a crowd funding website where teachers can ask for help funding educational projects.

Since November 2015, Haggen has contributed $195,000 to more than 616 projects at 303 Washington schools, impacting more than 47,000 students in the communities around its stores, according to a press release from the company.

Locally, Haggen funded a program at Blaine Primary School called Exploring Emotions with Robotics. In the program, first-graders in Mrs. Ebenal-Thompson’s class are learning to control robots with computers and learning coding skills in the process.

Haggen’s donations helped fund four Samsung Galaxy tablet computers and four Sphero app-controlled robots for the program, which cost $738. With a feature called Face Drive, the robots can be controlled through facial expressions.