A RIVERLAND council has been “overwhelmed” by the popularity of its activity packs aimed at helping local families through the school holidays.
Renmark Paringa Council earlier this month began releasing school holiday activity packs – containing a range of arts and crafts, plus health and wellbeing ideas – for children and parents self-isolating at home during the COVID-19 emergency.
Renmark Paringa Council director of corporate and community services Tim Pfeiffer said the packs were intended as a substitute for outdoor and group activities normally held during the school holidays.
“Renmark Paringa Council usually runs a school holiday program with events and activities to engage children during the holiday periods,” Mr Pfeiffer said
“Recent restrictions on social gatherings made it impossible to undertake the school holiday program in the usual format, so our team decided to get creative.
“We knew that local families would be eager to find activities for kids to do at home, so the team created 100 free school holiday activity packs for distribution in the first week of the holidays.”
Mr Pfeiffer said parents are able to organise a time when the activity packs can be collected at the Renmark Civic Centre with zero physical contact.
“The first 100 packs were snapped up in around 40 minutes, (so) the team quickly made up an extra 93 packs due to the demand,” he said.
“We’ll be distributing new rounds of activity packs for second and third weeks of the school holidays and have increased the production to 200 packs per week.
“Even the distribution of the packs has been carefully planned, with families nominating a time to collect their pack from the front of the Civic Centre.
“In terms of social distancing, this distribution method reduces the level of contact for both families and staff.”