Andrew Jackson Elementary School Needs Help

The Circle of Grandparents organization volunteers in the Worthington, Ohio Elementary School System, by volunteering time each month to talk to one of the classes. The volunteer works with the same class all year, and mine is Mrs. Dicke's Fourth Grade at Granby Elementary School where the kids know me as Grandpa Mitch.

Each month there is a discussion word, and December's was Compassion. Compassion vs. sympathy, as I chose to define compassion was: doing something about someone's problem as opposed to just feeling sorry for them. In that vein, I talked about the kids in the New Orleans area, and the continuing problems they face fifteen months after Katrina.

I had Googled the heck out of the Internet to find a school district with the most problems, and ended up finding the Andrew Jackson Elementary School in Chalmette, Louisiana. That's located in St. Bernard Parish near the city of New Orleans. Chalmette had 65,000 residents and thirteen schools prior to the storm. They now have 20,000 residents and only two schools. The children from the seven previous elementary schools were all moved into one of the former high schools, and they have 2,000 students in that one school. There are eleven fourth grades in the school, and I wanted to create a link between my kids' fourth grade and one of them.

The Supervisor of Personnel for the School Board helped me find the assistant principal, Lisa Young, who introduced me (via email) to Mrs. Donna Schultz who teaches a fourth grade class. We started to correspond about what she needed, and we here in Columbus, OH were taken aback by the simplicity of the needs - basic things like paper, markers, scotch tape, file folders, etc. etc.

Our kids were quick to jump on the idea of showing compassion, by gathering supplies and money over the Christmas holidays, and then bringing them to class. I'm going to drive to New Orleans to deliver the supplies in mid January.

While discussing the project with some friends, we quickly found how generous people can be when they know a problem exists. Within a week, we had collected several hundred dollars, and the amount has kept growing. This will be a parallel program to that of the kids', and we will aim at helping all eleven of the fourth grades.

We have a list of needed items from the teacher, and we did ship down an initial shipment of the most basic supplies so it will be there after the kids return from vacation. Now we are purchasing the other supplies needed in Mrs. Schultz's class, and making plans for the other ten.