LRS students sell Hershey Kiss Roses for Valentine's Day

RITZVILLE - Lind-Ritzville High School students in Andy Williams' floral design class are creating roses made out of Hershey Kiss candies for an FFA fundraiser.

Annika Holland, Iris Arrez, Madison Vlaske, Grace Fedie and Rosa Alfaro are the five students creating the gifts that blend flowers with candy.

"We try to do arrangements for the different holidays across the seasons," Williams said. "We did Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Valentine's just kind of made sense. And this is a good project for Valentine's. It hits two things at once: flowers and chocolate.

The girls said chocolate flowers are a Valentine's gift that they would enjoy receiving.

"I would think it was sweet to get one," Holland said.

"Since we are hand making them, they have that homemade touch," Arrez said. "So they look cute."

This is Williams' first year teaching the class. He admits that he is learning right along with his students.

"Amanda Klindworth at the middle school has a very strong floral program and gets a lot of these kids very interested in it," Williams said. "We just saw the need to continue it at the high school."

The students are selling bundles of five roses for $5 and 10 roses for $10. At the time the Journal's visit with the class on Tuesday, 140 roses had been sold. The girls say that number doesn't include additional requests made at the High School that day.

Williams says 140 was also the number they had to sell to break even.

"This class, and all the projects we do, is very helpful," Williams said. "We put a big focus on the business side of things. So they figure things out like the break-even number. If that's not a reasonable number, then I ask, 'How do we adjust and change things to make it reasonable and make it worth our time?"

Orders can be made by emailing Williams at [email protected] by Wednesday, Feb. 12.