Megan Carroll didn’t join the cheer heard around Wake County when 8,638 high school juniors were told their graduation projects would be optional for next year.

“They announced it the day before my event,” the 17-year-old Athens Drive junior from Cary said.

Carroll had already organized a “hunger walk,” built a Web site and enlisted three major sponsors in preparation for her project. She had filled a garbage bag with 50,000 Goldfish crackers, representing the number of people who die from starvation each day.

And she was counting on the event to raise funds for a church mission trip to Bolivia to combat malnutrition. Cancelled? No, she wasn’t cheering. But she also wasn’t going to quit.

“I figured I’d gotten this far, so why not complete it?” she said.

Carroll joins about 100 other Athens students who say they’re going to complete their projects, despite the North Carolina Board of Education’s decision April 21 to remove it as a graduation requirement for the class of 2010.

The project, a statewide initiative set to start with the class of 2010, includes writing a paper, producing a product and making a presentation. Many parents criticized it for being too extensive, students complained it heaped more onto their already full academic and extra-cirricular plates and schools struggled with finding the manpower to mentor it.

But Wake County has already spent more than $500,000 on the idea. And even though most Wake principals agreed with delaying implementation, Wake school board members said they’ll enforce the requirement for the class of 2011 regardless of any further state deferment — so get ready, sophomores.

“Everyone in my class was complaining that we don’t have enough time,” said Carroll, an honor roll student who juggles her own activities writing for the student newspaper, performing with color guard and volunteering with her church, while maintaining top grades in AP classes.

Her parents weren’t surprised that she wasn’t going to take the easy road. Her dad, who works with computers, helped her build the Web site, joked that they should just pack it up — maybe start eating those crackers, which were eventually donated to a soup kitchen in Raleigh.

“He’s really sarcastic,” she said. “But they’re proud of me for going through with it.”

Carroll hopes the special cord she’ll get to wear at graduation and notation on her transcript — the school’s acknowledgment to the students completing the project — will set her apart when college applications roll around.

“I want to go to UNC-Chapel Hill for journalism,” she said. “It’s a competitive school.”

Carroll has been thinking about the problem of world hunger for a while. She saw the issue firsthand as a sixth-grader on a mission trip with her mom in Haiti.

“It was just awful. There’s sewage running down the sides of the street,” she said, explaining that her family sponsors two Haitian children whom she got to meet on the trip. The inequality she saw between her life and their’s changed her. “They eat once a day and I can eat whenever I want.”

The images stuck with Carroll and she has made volunteering a priority, including “gleaning” from local farms, a practice of gathering useable crops farmers leave behind after harvest.

“I’ve gleaned strawberries, sweet potatoes, watermelons — that was hard, but it was fun,” she said.

The class project seemed like a logical extension of her passion to help. The walk-a-thon earned her $1,400 for the mission trip and provided a “big box” of canned goods for the Food Bank. She also set up hunger fact signs along the walking path to spread awareness.

She’s looking forward to presenting her work at school in October, which will include pictures and stories from her trip to Bolivia.

“I was raised that we have to help people less fortunate than us,” she said. “You get to spend time with your friends while helping other people out.”

To donate to Megan's fundraiser to combat hunger, visit megansfeedingfrenzy.com.