OUR NEIGHBORS | Eagle Scout with Down syndrome acquires thousands of supplies for special education project

Logan, who has Down syndrome, collected Clorox wipes, tissues, ramen noodles, granola bars and laundry soap, setting up shop at Dillons East, Dillons Westloop and Hy-Vee. He also collected grocery bags, seven boxes of cereal and a large amount of cash, all not originally on the list. The results from standing for four summer days at local stores were astonishing.

“All together we collected 6,792 loads of laundry detergent (based on how many loads were on a bottle), 229 bottles of Clorox wipes, 4,300 granola bars…” Erin Brooks read from her notes. “You should have seen the teachers; they cried when they came over.”

Logan, sitting beside his mother interrupted with, “Yep! Ms. (Jamie) Schnee and Mrs. (Caroline) Gunn.” Schnee is director of special education at MHS, and Gunn is a former director of special ed. 

Erin continued listing the totals; she said 438 boxes of tissues, 2,165 individual packages of ramen noodles, about a 1,000 grocery bags and $1,860 cash. Her husband, Nathan Brooks, thought it could be anywhere from 2,000-3,000 bags. The two agreed that the teachers could potentially make it through the year with that amount.

Logan copied a proposal for the plan in his own hand writing, cut out hundreds of flyers and talked to donors. He also assisted his teacher, Vicki Newton, with designing flyers. Along with help from his family, a fellow scout and family friend, Patrick Huser, 15, of Manhattan helped Brooks collect at Hy-Vee.

Huser allowed Topeka TV station WIBW to interview him and run a story about Logan’s project. The Brooks family didn’t know it at the time, but the story became “unintentional” free marketing for more donations.

“We did have some people that came up and were like, ‘Hey, I saw it was on the TV channel, and yeah it was kind of a ways out (from Manhattan), but I saw this and made sure to come out here today,’” Nathan said about donors.

Erin noted the diversity of those who donated to the project. Many of the donors were people who were in Scouts or had family in Scouts.

“Sometimes it was widows whose husbands were Eagle Scouts, and their boys were Eagle Scouts and donated in in their family member’s honor,” Erin said. It was just a lot of really generous people who knew what the cause is and wanted to support it.”

The special education program has allowed Logan to have one-on-one attention, which helped him with reading comprehension, writing, and speech. His mother said she and her husband enrolled their son into “regular classes” at first, but his mom said Logan loves being “with his people.” He continues to participate in standard physical education and weight lifting courses.

Logan yelled “Yes!” when answering whether he likes sports.

Giving back to the special education and life skills classes isn’t complete. Ace Hardware donated a trailer for the Brooks family to transport the thousands of classroom objects to the high school. The family members decided they are hauling everything over at 6 p.m. Thursday.