Ford School students get all bundled up

LYNN – A 25-foot truck backed up to the Ford School last week filled with some very warm cargo for some very lucky students, all 600-plus of them.”We gave every single kid in the school a new winter coat,” said Principal Claire Crane.Paid for through a grant from Cradles to Crayons, Crane said she ordered coats for all the students because she didn’t think it fair to leave out roughly 50 students.”We’re 91 percent free and reduced lunch,” she said. “How do I tell the 40 kids who aren’t that they can’t have a coat?”When the people at Cradles to Crayons warned her she would need a large truck to pick up the boxes, Crane called on an old friend, Tom Demakes, president of Old Neighborhood Foods. She said Demakes sent a truck and a driver who picked up the boxes of coats and delivered them to the school.Crane said when they unpacked the coats they realized that a lot were the same style just different sizes.”We thought, ?Oh no, the coat room will be a nightmare, how will we tell them apart?'” she said. “So we set up three stations.”Staffers and about 20 parent volunteers staffed three tables, one where students picked up hats and mittens, at the second they were outfitted with a new coat and at the third table an adult wrote the child’s name in the coat with an indelible marker.Of course, there were glitches, Crane said. When picking sizes they did not allow for the fact that some of the coats ran small so there are about 100 coats that need to be exchanged for bigger ones, she said.”Everyone got a coat but we ran short in the fourth grade, which needed larger sizes,” Crane said. “They will let us swap them out and the coats should be here next week.”Crane said parents were thrilled with the surprise and she is grateful to Jennifer Wu, the School Department’s Wraparound Zone Program Specialist, who sent her the grant information.”I know there are other schools doing this,” Crane said. “Jennifer sent us the information, and we took the ball and ran ? you should have seen the parents’ faces.”The donation of coats was offered to all Lynn elementary schools (Cradles to Crayons mostly has clothes for young children because they get donations from affluent communities whose children have quickly outgrown their clothes), but schools had to arrange their own transportation of the coats from Boston to the schools. Time and money limited the number of participating schools. The following schools arranged for the coats: Cobbet, Fallon, Harrington and Washington.