"Project Underpants" has collected 1,486 pair of underpants under the help of Stuart Pope, assistant professor of nursing and faculty staff adviser for the student nursing association.
Head Start first started gathering underpants a few years ago when they kept hearing reports of children having accidents in their pants at school.
Then those children didn't have any clothes to change into, Pope said.
There has been one instance where a boy kept using the bathroom in his pants during school just because he wanted to get a new pair of underwear, Pope said.
"I think someone may have just given him a whole pack so that he wouldn't have to do that anymore," Pope said.
Project underpants is an annual event, said Les- lie Day, senior in nursing.
"I don't think it has been very successful in the past," Day said.
Karen Lusk, Opelika Head Start educator and trainer, said this year has been the best so far for
"Project Underpants." "We literally had (baskets) all over campus," Pope said. "Wherever there was a basket, there
was a poster." Day is the project manager of collecting new underwear for "Project Underpants."
Day distributed the baskets and posters made by her peers in the school of nursing.
"(Day) is the one that kind of spearheaded the whole thing," Pope said. "She got the clothes baskets made and got the signs made up and really promoted the whole thing."
Pope said the nurses association has grown.
"Our Student Nurses Association went from a rather small number to, right now, we have over a hundred members," Pope said.
The first semester of senior year for nursing students is their hardest year, Pope said.
"I don't have a life," Day said. "I'm not sleeping much."
The SNA provided the posters made for "Project Underpants."
Constance Hendricks, professor of nursing, specializes in health promo- tion in rural and minority health.
"We are delighted that Dr. Pope has joined the faculty for a lot of reasons," Hendricks said.
Pope brought Auburn's SNA from 10 members to
more than 100 over the course of only one semester.
"He has taken what we already had was a student nursing organization and taken it up to a whole 'nother level," Hendricks said.
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