The Thomasville Chamber of Commerce is gearing up for its annual Back to School Rocks event, a community giveaway that rewards children who find hidden painted rocks around town with a free backpack. The event has become one of the small Clarke County city’s most anticipated summer traditions, blending a town-wide treasure hunt with practical help for families staring down another year of school supply lists.
A specific date has not yet been set and will be announced once the rocks are ready. That sequencing is part of the event’s charm: organizers will not hide a single painted stone until the backpacks behind the giveaway are secured, so that every child who spends an afternoon searching is guaranteed a prize at the end of it. Chamber officials say the announcement will come through the organization’s usual channels once sponsors and volunteers have finished their part.
The format is simple enough for any child to understand. For the event, volunteers paint rocks with encouraging messages and images, then hide them in locations throughout Thomasville for children to discover. Kids who find a rock can turn it in to claim a backpack. No entry fee, no registration, no paperwork — just a child, a rock, and a backpack full of the tools they will need when classes resume.
A Tradition Born From Kindness
The Thomasville tradition traces back to August 2017, when it began as a local spinoff of the nationwide Kindness Rocks Project, a movement that encourages people to paint rocks with uplifting words or artwork, hide them for others to find, and then have the finder hide the rock again so someone else can discover it. What started as a coast-to-coast arts trend found fertile ground in Thomasville, where residents embraced the idea of leaving small messages of encouragement scattered around town for strangers to stumble upon.
Thomasville resident Amy Prescott adapted the concept into the town’s own backpack giveaway, adding the school-supply twist that turned an inspirational pastime into a community service project. The adaptation captured something essential about the original movement — the delight of an unexpected gift found in an ordinary place — while pointing it at a concrete local need: making sure local children started the school year prepared.
In the years since, the event has grown into a fixture of Thomasville’s back-to-school calendar, drawing families to parks, businesses and neighborhoods where the previous night’s hiding spots are rumored to be. Parents describe children comparing finds like trophies, and volunteers describe the pleasure of watching a simple painted stone send a family laughing across a park in search of another.
How the Giveaway Works
The Back to School Rocks giveaway took place this week, with the chamber hiding 48 painted rocks at locations around Thomasville. Each rock represented one backpack, one child and one small act of generosity from a local sponsor, and the hiding spots were spread deliberately across town so that the hunt reached every corner of the community rather than clustering around a single park or street.
Children who found a rock brought it to the chamber’s temporary office at the Thomasville Golf Course clubhouse, where they traded it for a backpack filled with school supplies. The clubhouse headquarters gave the week a gathering point — a place where families ran into neighbors, volunteers sorted supplies, and the pile of backpacks shrank as the rocks came in. For many kids, the trade was the best part: a painted keepsake in one hand and a brand-new backpack in the other.
The remaining backpacks are being delivered to Thomasville Elementary School so they can still reach local students. That safety net matters to organizers, who want the event’s generosity to reach children who missed the hunt itself — kids who were out of town, who never heard about a hiding spot, or who simply had bad luck searching. The school delivery ensures that every backpack sponsored by the community ends up on a child’s shoulders before the first bell rings.
Sponsors Behind the Backpacks
This year’s giveaway was made possible through sponsorships from First US Bank, Thomasville Grill LLC, Tommy’s Weight Room, Half Baked, Midway Baptist Church, Otter Shirt Co., CMC Gas, West Alabama Insurance Company and State Farm agent Larry Jones. The sponsor list reads like a cross-section of the town itself — banks, restaurants, gyms, churches, insurers and retailers — which is exactly the point. The event works because the whole business community treats it as a shared project.
Businesses and community groups can sponsor a backpack for $25, which covers the school supplies inside and includes recognition of the sponsor’s name or logo along with advertising through social media, radio and local newspapers. The sponsorship model keeps the event sustainable year after year: a modest, fixed contribution buys a sponsor both a good deed and a genuine presence in one of the town’s most visible community events, and the chamber handles the logistics of purchasing, packing and distributing the supplies.
For sponsors, the visibility is real. Families photograph their finds and share them online, the rock hunt itself generates word-of-mouth that spreads far beyond the participants, and the sponsor roll call travels through the same channels. In a town the size of Thomasville, goodwill of that kind is its own form of advertising, and local businesses have shown they understand the exchange.
Why School Supplies Matter
Back-to-school season is one of the most expensive stretches of the year for families with school-age children. Supply lists grow longer each fall — notebooks, folders, headphones, calculators, tissues and disinfecting wipes — and the total adds up quickly, particularly for households with several students. A backpack already filled with the essentials removes a meaningful slice of that burden, and for families living paycheck to paycheck in August, it can be the difference between a confident first day and a stressful one.
Teachers feel the impact too. When students arrive without supplies, the shortfall often comes out of classroom budgets and teachers’ own pockets, a quiet subsidy that rural schools like Thomasville’s know well. Community giveaways such as this one ease that pressure at the source, putting the tools in children’s hands before the school year begins rather than asking classrooms to absorb the gap.
The Chamber’s Role in a Small Town
Events like Back to School Rocks illustrate the role a chamber of commerce plays in a town Thomasville’s size. Beyond recruiting businesses and hosting ribbon-cuttings, the chamber functions as the connective tissue of community life — the organization with the volunteers, the mailing list and the credibility to pull schools, churches and merchants into the same project. The painted rocks may be the visible symbol, but the machinery behind them is institutional: sponsors recruited, supplies purchased and packed, hiding routes mapped, and a distribution plan ready for whatever rocks come back.
Thomasville, the largest city in Clarke County, has a long history of civic organizations stepping up for its schools, and the chamber’s leaders have framed this event as part of that lineage. The message to families is that the community sees them and is invested in their children’s success — a message delivered, in this case, one painted rock at a time.
Organizers say the event’s future looks bright. The combination that made it work in 2017 — a simple idea, a willing business community and children who love a treasure hunt — has not worn out, and each summer’s edition has been met with more sponsors and more searching families than the last. Residents interested in sponsoring a backpack or volunteering to paint and hide rocks for future events can contact the Thomasville Chamber of Commerce directly, and families are encouraged to watch the chamber’s announcements for the moment the next batch of rocks goes into hiding.
Until then, the town’s remaining backpacks are headed to Thomasville Elementary School, the last painted rocks have been found, and another school year in Thomasville is starting the way its summers have come to end — with a community that decided, one stone at a time, that every child should start class prepared.
Painted Rocks, Hidden With Care
Preparing the rocks is a project of its own. Volunteers gather smooth stones, coat them in paint, and turn them into tiny canvases carrying words like “believe” and “you’ve got this,” along with school colors, mascots and cheerful drawings. The painting sessions have become social events in their own right, with families, church groups and business employees pitching in across a spread of brushes and paint bottles until the year’s quota is ready to hide.
The hiding itself is done with an eye toward fairness and safety. Rocks go into public, accessible places — parks, sidewalks, storefront entrances and other spots where children can search with parents nearby — and volunteers space them across the community so the hunt feels town-wide rather than neighborhood-specific. Organizers avoid dangerous or remote locations, keeping the event friendly for even the youngest searchers.
The Kindness Rocks roots still show in the details. Many children who turn in their rock ask to keep it as a souvenir before collecting their backpack, and some hide it again afterward for the next searcher, exactly as the national movement prescribes. The chamber has embraced that cycle, treating the keepsake instinct as the event’s engine: each rock that keeps moving leaves a little encouragement behind for whoever finds it next.
As Thomasville waits for the next date announcement, the pattern is already set. Rocks will be painted, hidden and hunted; sponsors will be thanked; backpacks will change hands at the clubhouse and at the elementary school doors. In a world of complicated fundraising schemes, the town’s formula remains stubbornly simple — hide some kindness around town and let the children of Thomasville find it.