The Batesville Exchange Club will sponsor a Spring Pancake Breakfast for Child Abuse Saturday, April 2 from 7 to 10 a.m. in the Batesville Intermediate School cafeteria.

Club members added the spring event to their calendar to augment the popular fall pancake breakfast held each October. Child abuse prevention is the club’s primary focus. Major beneficiaries are the Boys and Girls Club of Northwest Mississippi and the Exchange Club Family Center in Oxford.

Batesville Exchange president Jimmy Smith recently presented a donation of $1,000 to the Boys and Girls Club Director Belinda Morris. Accompanying Morris to the meeting was Britney Pope, a South Panola High School senior who was selected as the club’s Student of the Year. Pope said that she had been a member of the Boys and Girls Club since she was 10 years old.

“I grew up in the Boys and Girls Club,” Pope said. She said while her mother, Beverly, worked a long shift as a dispatcher with the Batesville Police Department, the club “was like a home away from home. It was my safe place,” she said.

The Boys and Girls Club in Batesville hosts 80 to 90 children after school each day, five days a week, Morris said. Clubs in Sardis and Crenshaw meet three days a week.

A $1,000 donation to the Exchange Club Family Center will follow, Smith said, depleting most of the Batesville Exchange Club’s funds and elevating the urgency of ticket sales for the April 2 pancake breakfast.

“People have been good about coming out to support us in the fall,” Smith said. “They always have a good time and we think they will support us in April.”

Tickets are available from Exchange members and at The Panolian.