Click of a mouse turns teacher into hero
Published: October 7, 2005
A hunch, some keystrokes and the click of a mouse made one Medfield teacher into a humanitarian hero.
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast at the end of August, she knew there would be children torn away from home, forced to go to school for months in a foreign place, with kids they didn’t know and teachers they’d never met. She also knew they’d need supplies, probably more than their host schools could provide, and that’s what led her to the internet in search of a school for Medfield students to sponsor.
“I did a search on the Web, a Google search, because I wanted to find a group of displaced children who needed school supplies,” said Marie Pendergast, a first grade teacher at Memorial Elementary School. “Then I contacted their contact person and verified that they did in fact need supplies.”
The school she’d matched Memorial up with was in Humble, Texas, a Houston suburb of 15,000 residents whose schools have taken in nearly 600 students displaced from Gulf Coast districts. Schools in the independent district are allowing displaced families to register their children in the area by completing a short form; families are not required to provide records or many of the other documents typically required of new students, and most of them are automatically qualified for free or reduced lunches and school supplies.
Memorial School shipped 20 boxes of supplies, filled with everything from crayons to markers and rulers, to the Humble Independent School District in the weeks after the hurricane. Parents packed the boxes, many of the packages weighing in at more than 30 pounds, in the office of the Adams Street school building.
“We just looked at the list of Elementary supplies, sent out a flyer and it resulted in more than 20 cartons of material being sent. It included the materials a first grader would need, some notebooks and pencils and some parents put in a backpack. We sent everything you could imagine. For the little kids to see the materials, it makes a lot more impact than money does to them. This way, we did it in a manner we thought even our little kids could appreciate.”
– Barbara Levine, Memorial School Principal
She also said a donation of $600 also covered the cost of shipping the boxes cross-country.
Their shipment was delayed by the onset of Hurricane Rita, which packed a less menacing punch than Katrina but still threatened to disrupt shipping routes and mail delivery for days. The boxes were shipped two weeks ago and the school is still waiting to hear if they’ve been received.
“We just had a tremendous response at every level, from parents to the community and every facet within the school, from teachers to aids to custodians,” Pendergast said. “Everybody did a little pitching in, and it was just a total community effort.”
According to the Humble Chamber of Commerce hurricane relief Web site, the area has been overrun by donations from around the country and can accommodate little more beside cash donations or gift certificates. It lists pressing needs such as donations for 400 more school uniforms, CVS and Target gift cards. Many of the area’s churches are running shelters that are at capacity and in need of clothing donations as well, the site said.
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