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When Henry Peters arrived this year as principal of South Vancouver’s John Henderson Elementary, one thing he noticed was that some children entering kindergarten weren’t as prepared for school life as they should have been.
“I see the kindergarteners every week and I could just tell at the beginning of the year that there was something missing in the basics — recognizing letters, sounds, colours, numbers — some of the things we take for granted in children arriving in kindergarten,” said Peters.
“Other things, too, like socialization — how do you play with other students of the same age, how do you take turns, how do you use the washroom, wash your hands, self-care … those things.”
The school on East 51st near Fraser St. has 479 students and four kindergarten classes.
“The community here is very strong and supportive, but it does have some challenges,” said Peters.
Many families are living in basement suites as they don’t have the ability to move to other cities where rents are more affordable, he said.
“That’s a struggle for a lot of families, and the kids who come to kindergarten struggle, too, and are not school-ready,” he said.
There is a StrongStart program for three-to-five year olds that runs each morning, but it is overloaded and can’t handle the volume of parents wanting to enroll their children.
“We have to tell them we can’t take any more because of fire marshal regulations.”
Peters is asking The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign for $10,000 so he can run a second program for parents and children each afternoon, specifically designed for children about to enter kindergarten in September.
It is a program that Adopt-A-School has been supporting for a number of years and is hoping to maintain it.
Zabeen Hussain teaches StrongStart and says the afternoon program, which she will run, would be solely directed at getting children ready for school.
“StrongStart is a lot of play, but the afternoon program is for children coming into kindergarten and is more focused on learning.”
How important is it?
“Very. We have a large population of Southeast Asian families, and their thinking is a little bit different about school. They believe if they send their children to school they will learn what they need without them having to do any work at home.
“But that’s not the case. Children have to be ready for school, be able to write their name, recognize the alphabet, show some critical thinking. So, in some ways, we have to educate the children and parents,” she said.
Parents and caregivers will be required to accompany children in the program.
Peters said early intervention is important. Supporting children when they first enter school has the most impact.
“I’m not going to say they won’t be successful at school or won’t graduate, but getting them ready for school at least levels the playing field for these children at the beginning,” he said.
Peters said the afternoon program would also expose some parents to social and health programs they may not be aware of.
“Some of our communities are not as aware about what supports there are for their kids if they have physical or medical or intellectual needs. Some communities have more education around what services they can go to for help when they are thinking about how their child is developing,” said Peters.
So having parents and caregivers attend the program was a good way to get them connected to the social and medical systems, he said.
“In some ways, this program is a pre-screener. Perhaps a child has an intellectual disability or even a physical one. It’s a way of connecting to community services or Vancouver Coastal Health, and that’s very important.”
OUR 2017 CAMPAIGN IS CLOSED. PLEASE SEE OUR MAIN PAGE (https://fundrazr.com/profiles/vancouver-sun-childrens-fund) FOR OUR CURRENT CAMPAIGN.
The Vancouver Sun’s seventh annual Adopt-A-School campaign is under way, and we are again asking readers to consider the plight of children who come to school unfed, improperly dressed and suffering the psychological effects of living in poverty.
We are not talking about a few children. We are talking about thousands.
They are found in every school district in this province, no exceptions.
Last year the Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund, which administers Adopt-A-School (AAS), distributed $604,000 in emergency funds to 86 schools across the province to help alleviate the most two most common forms of suffering — hunger and lack of proper clothing.
And while much of the money was spent in this way, there were also grants to help teachers heal some of the psychological damage to children whose lives are so blighted by poverty that they are arriving in school at their wit’s end.
Money was spent on supplying and equipping sensory rooms where children can decompress and be soothed into a state where they can function and learn and on other therapeutic programs that teachers tell us they need.
“Since AAS began in 2011 we have sent almost $4 million to teachers and principals struggling to deal with the effects of poverty, in almost all cases, without resources,” said Harold Munro, editor of the Vancouver Sun and The Province and chair of The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund board.
When a parent shows up at a school in tears with no food in the home and no money to buy any what are they supposed to do?
It happens regularly in schools all across the province.
“For teachers and principals it must be heartbreaking and this newspaper does not think it right that this burden should be borne by them alone,” Munro said.
“We are all in this together, these are our children and it is immoral to ignore the wants of the poor.”
AAS has:
* Provided money for emergency food vouchers.
* Supported programs that distribute food in order to get impoverished families through the weekend.
* Bought beds to get children off the floor, or to replace those infested with bedbugs.
* Bought lice kits.
* Provided money to a special unit that deals with the most vulnerable students in danger of being sexually exploited or tempted to join gangs for no other reason than not having enough money to buy a meal or a decent winter coat.
It has got to the point that we are seeing not only concern from adults but from students.
The last campaign showed that children in the Gulf Islands were bringing extra food to feed hungry friends who had none. In Langley three teenagers set up their own program to feed needy families over weekends.
This campaign tell the story of how high school students in a Vancouver school have been moved to organize their own breakfast program after discovering that a quarter of the school’s students were without food at home at least once during a month.
So the problem is obvious to school districts, principal, teachers and now other students.
The Vancouver Sun has never said a critical word about any political party in relation to the AAS campaign, except to ask the government of the day to do something.
We are repeating that request to this new government.
In the meantime we are again asking our readers to support our campaign. Your generosity has carried us this far.
You have fed thousands of children, helped hundreds of families.
“We can’t do it without you,” Munro said.
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