SWAMPSCOTT — A generous fundraising effort from Clarke Elementary School fourth-grade students is providing relief to a Texas classroom that lost its reading area to Hurricane Harvey in late August.
For their first major service project of the year, the fourth-grade leaders program at Clarke School decided to help the Hurricane Harvey victims because that was the most relevant disaster at the time, said Cathy Kalpin, school adjustment counselor at Clarke and facilitator of the program.
Since Harvey, there have been two other major hurricanes: Irma, which battered the Florida Keys, and Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico.
Kalpin said one of the teachers picked a program where the fourth graders were matched through an organization to a fourth grade classroom in Fannett, Texas, the Hamshire-Fannett Intermediate school. She said the Texas classroom had lost their reading center to flooding, and asked Clarke to raise funds so they could replace it.
She said the Texas classroom needed new beanbag chairs, a rug, books and shelves. To cover the beanbag, chairs and rugs, the Clarke students would need to raise $300. Kalpin said the students ended up raising $600 by going into classrooms and collecting spare change for two weeks.
“I loved the idea that they wanted to reach out,” said Kalpin of the Clarke students. “They knew how lucky they were … They loved the idea that it was another fourth-grade classroom that they were connected to. It made it really real for them.”
Kalpin said the service project was initiated in September, but Clarke didn’t get matched up with a Texas classroom until the end of that month, and collected in the first two weeks of October.
With the funds, Kalpin said Amazon cards were purchased and sent to the recipient, Vickie Moore, a fourth grade reading teacher at Hamshire-Fannett Intermediate School. Moore said the flooding from the hurricane destroyed the reading area the day before school was supposed to start.
Moore said the flooding forced everyone out of Hamshire-Fannett Intermediate School, with students and staff now crammed into the elementary school. To accommodate the two schools in one, she said teachers are now teaching in hallways and computer rooms. She said her school probably won’t be fixed until the end of the year.
She said her school can’t afford to reimburse her for her classroom’s reading area because it doesn’t have the money as it is in a poor area. She said she had purchased items in the reading area with her own money.
Moore said she has a small classroom she’s teaching out of in the elementary school, where she has a reading area temporarily set up. She said three bean bag chairs that she has purchased with the Amazon cards from Clarke have already come in, and she’s waiting on another bean bag chair and rug, which should be coming this week. She is also planning to buy four sets of literature study books, which are part of the curriculum.
The Texas teacher said the area was devastated by the hurricane. There was more than 40 inches of rain in two days. Sixty percent of the school’s teachers and students had their homes flooded and have been forced to temporarily move in with family, relocate to hotels, or stay in trailers set up in their front yards. Moore said she is currently staying with her mother in Belmont, Texas.
To make matters worse, she said most people in the area don’t have insurance because it’s a poor place that usually doesn’t flood. She said the effort from Clarke School has been “a huge blessing and we’re overwhelmed that they raised so much money for us.
“It touched our hearts deeply,” Moore said. “We were shocked that someone so far away would care about us, especially that they’re fourth graders. This area is going to take years to recover from this … They made it easier for us to recuperate by caring about us.”
