The barrels are overflowing with food and the jars are waiting to be stuffed with coins. It's holiday season at Ida Price Middle School, and the spirit of giving is in the air.

Like countless other schools across the United States, Ida Price is in the midst of holiday-giving activities during which students and teachers alike raise food and money to help those less fortunate than themselves.

Behind the wheel of the school's philanthropic efforts is a group of 30 seventh- and eighth-grade students who are studying leadership.

"We organize everything that happens at this school—dances, fundraisers, food drives," says Christine Herman, 13, an eighth-grade student in the leadership class. "Basically, the school counts on us to get things done."

The group is in the midst of running the school's annual Thanksgiving food drive. It's also preparing to kick off its next endeavor, a coin drive beginning Dec. 1 that pits boys against girls in what's been billed as a "battle of the sexes."

Ida Price has held the Thanksgiving food drive for as long as Eileen Beckley, who teaches the leadership class and physical education, can remember. Beckley has been at the school for 10 years. She describes the annual event as a standard food-drive competition, where different classes compete against each other in order to see which one can raise the most food in a two-week period.

But event organizers say the competition isn't everything.

"My students are jazzed about helping the community," Beckley says.

Eighth-grader Christine Herman agrees.

"To me, this is mostly about contributing to charities and other good causes," she says. "The competition aspect is just a good way to raise more while giving the students a chance to win something, too."

When the food drive is over, the school will give what it collects to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara County, a private nonprofit organization that collects and distributes millions of pounds of food each year to low-income children, adults and seniors.

But the two-week food competition is only one part of the school's food-collecting effort, Beckley says.

At every school social event during the year—dances, for example—in addition to the standard $5 admission fee and a signed permission slip from their parents, students need to present a can of food in order to get in, 12-year-old leadership student Carolyn Camara says.

With leadership students collecting and counting those cans and more, the school makes a total of five donations a year to Second Harvest Food Bank. And behind the scenes, Herman and her classmates put in overtime to make sure the food drives go smoothly.

"They put in more than 720 minutes a year of volunteer work," Beckley says, explaining that they run the show. "They put up posters, ensure food barrels go to the right place and count how much food has come in. It's a great group of kids."

But participation in Ida Price's leadership class isn't for everyone. While the school has students from the sixth to eighth grades, the classes are designed only for the seventh- and eighth-grade students who demonstrate an interest in the class and maturity.

"They have more responsibility, being older," Camara says.

Students also must apply for the class and have a teacher recommendation to be accepted for the class. Students are evaluated on many things, says Beckley, including their integrity, initiative, sense of responsibility and ability to serve as role models.

"They're in the limelight a lot," she says.

Once they're in, the responsibilities begin. One of the important decisions the leadership class makes is to determine the recipient of money raised at the school's annual holiday coin drive.

The drive is like coin drives conducted at other schools, Beckley says, but it has the added element of gender competition.

"It's a battle of the sexes," she says.

Girls put pennies into the girl jar and boys put pennies into the boy jar. Each penny has a positive point value, and the gender with the highest point value wins. The contest differs from those of other school drives, however, in that if someone sees that the other gender has more pennies in its jar, he or she can start putting in silver coins—which have negative point values—into the opponents' jar.

"Actually, so many silver coins go into the opponents' jar that winners end up being decided by which gender has the smallest negative value," Beckley says.

So even though the point value might be diminished for individual teams, the additional coins mean the overall monetary value increases.

Since Beckley introduced the competitive aspect of the game a decade ago, she says the pot has grown significantly.

"We generally bring in about $700 for the two-week drive," she says. "The first time we did it, the pot was only about $100."

For the past few years the school has raised the average amount of $700, a figure Beckley expects to see this year, as well. But it has collected as much as $1,000 in the past and as little as $500, she says. She warns, however, that the bad economy may result in less money this year.

Although the coin drive might be billed as a battle of the sexes, for as long as anyone can remember, it has been no contest. Girls have won every single year the coin drive has been conducted.

The general consensus is that they'll win this year, too.

"The girls will probably win this year," admits Ryan Austin, 12, a seventh-grader and one of only three male students in the leadership class. "They're a lot more responsible."

For the leadership students, however, there is much more to think about than merely pondering who will win.

"Most people probably just think about beating the other sex—boys beating girls and girls beating boys. But the leadership group has to decide where and how we will spend the money," says Camara.

The school has typically used the money to buy dinners for needy families in the school, Beckley says. In one year, for example, it bought a Christmas dinner for the widow of a volunteer in the school who maintained the school gardens.

Past leadership groups have also chosen to donate to a school in the Midwest suffering after a natural disaster, to a school in New Jersey after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and locally to the nonprofit organization Sacred Heart Community Center, she adds.

This year, the leadership class voted to donate the proceeds to the Breast Cancer Society, Center for Domestic Violence Prevention and the Giving Tree.

But before they can know how much they're going to donate, they need to raise as much money as they can. And they're relying on the spirit of competition to help them accomplish their goals.

"If they take the competitive aspect away, I don't think the students would be as motivated," Camara says. "We're all friends, but it's just that we want to show who's better."

In the end, most of the leadership students say, even though the competition makes it fun, winning isn't everything.

"The money we give to the Breast Cancer Society will give scientists a bit more money for research, so it helps with people's health," says Lauren Church, 12. "People are happy to win, but in the end they feel better as people just for helping other people out."

Given the lessons learned, the money and food raised, and the causes to which the fruits of the student efforts go, no matter what the outcome of the Ida Price contest, everyone comes out a winner.