NFL Legends donate $100K to Atlanta school

ATLANTA (FOX 5 Atlanta) - The Super Bowl isn't just helping Atlanta's businesses and sports fans, one local school is benefiting in a big way from the big game coming to town.

The NFL Legends community got 32 celebrities and former NFL players together to raise money for Humphries Elementary School in Southeast Atlanta.

The school, though far from the lights of Mercedes-Benz Stadium, is feeling the lasting impact this fundraising effort has on the school and its students. 

Principal Melanie Mitchell sees the challenges her students face.

"There are no grocery stores in this community. The corner store up the street is pretty much it," Mitchell says. "There are no business in the community, so it's often hard to receive assistance from different sponsorships."

Of the students, 95 percent live in low-income households, with 20 percent growing up in families earning incomes below $10,000.

"This portion of Atlanta is just very limited in what the community has to offer," Mitchell says.

The need is great, but so are the 300 young scholars at this APD school. 

That's where the NFL Legends Community comes in. 

"It's a brotherhood. It's a group of former NFL players, hall-of-famers ... all pros, and all the guys who played," Atlanta resident and former NFL player Takeo Spikes said. "It's a way for all of us to come together to not only stay intact but to be able to use our leverage inside of every community."

And they are giving back in a big way, pledging $100,000 to the school.

"We chose Humphries elementary school because they need it," Spikes said.

Mitchell said she was "blown away" by the donation, and said the money will be used for experiences outside of textbooks – like field trips and extracurricular activities. 

Another big need is updating technology for the kids.

"I want to get to the point where we have one laptop per student. Because just about all of their work now is done on laptops," she said. "It will mean everything to the kids to receive Chromebooks, to receive digital tablets."

For the students at Humphries Elementary, this is a game changer. But so is knowing that the NFL Legends Community cared enough to invest in them. 

"We're going to give them everything that they need, so they can walk away feeling love and understanding that this is what it's going to take in order to get to that next level," Spikes said.