Members of the Franklin Township Youth Center were treated to a special event on September 7: A Back-To-School festival.

The students, in grades 6 through 12, were offered activities such as laser tag in the gym and computer games, and treated to a full barbecue.

The event was not new to the Center, said Windy White, the center’s director, but the scale was.

“This is not the first year we’re doing ready set school, but this is the first year that we’ve made it even bigger and better,” she said.

White said teh event was to showcase some of the upcoming programs offered by the Youth Center.

“This is our program called Ready, Set, School, and the focus is to really support and encourage our middle schoolers and our high schoolers as they transition from a wonderful summer and all the programs that we’ve offered into a wonderful fall and all the new programs that we’re going to be offering,” she said.

“We have a fresh set of activities that we wanted to highlight,” White said. “We’ve invited the parents to also join us today, so you’ll see some parents sprinkled about just so that they have a chance to meet the staff and talk a little bit about some of the things that we do, say hello, and to enjoy all the frivolity and festivities.”

It wasn’t all fun and games, she said.

“We also have identified some of our young people that really have a great need in terms of back-to-school supplies,” White said. “And we got sponsors to donate supplies that these young people are going to need to go back to school and they’re going to get them to that.”

“Backpacks, pencils, pens,” she said. “It’s a program that we duplicated last year that was a really tremendous hit and we were able to provide, I think, up to 35 students were able to get free backpacks and supplies to go back to school. So we’re very, very, very happy about that.”

Here are some scenes from the day: