Each year for the past three years, Chelsea Greilach has bought raffle tickets to try her luck in a multi-school car giveaway.

In December, she was in luck — she won a truck.

"I didn't believe them when they called me," Greilach said Wednesday. "It was one of my daughter's friends who called and said we won the truck, and I didn't believe them."

Greilach, of Rathdrum, has four kids at Genesis Preparatory Academy in Post Falls, one of the car raffle's participating schools. She said she usually buys a few of the $10 raffle tickets, but this year bought 200 of them.

"We sold a lot of them," she said. "Whichever ones we didn't sell we paid for the rest, because that's my kids' sports fees for the year."

A total of 4,854 raffle tickets were sold for the 2022 car raffle, which launched in March, bringing in $48,540 for participating schools — Genesis Prep and Wallace, Lakeside, Kootenai, Clark Fork, Mullan, Kellogg and St. Maries high schools.

Proceeds from the raffle mostly support athletics, but also help fund facilities, school supplies, drama departments, associated student body programs, book clubs, and National Honor Society programming.

The multi-school raffle has been held for at least five years. Since 2017, 16,761 tickets have been sold to raise $48,540 for the participating schools.

Jonah Namson of Post Falls Volkswagen has supported the raffle since 2017. This year, he partnered with Nick Nivette of Coeur d'Alene Nissan and Osburn-based Zanetti Bros., Inc. to sweeten the annual raffle with a brand new black 2023 Nissan Frontier truck.

With four kids, the Greilach family decided to trade in the Frontier for a newer Chevy Traverse, a "people mover," as Greilach called it.

"We're looking at this going, 'It only has four seats,'" she said. "I have a lot of kids so we need a lot of seats."

Greilach said it was awesome to win the big prize in a raffle that supports programming for students while giving parents' pocketbooks a break.

"It’s really nice because it offsets what we have to spend on sports fees for the kids, which is a lot when you have four of them," Greilach said. "It was really cool that I won a truck."