Every week, small groups of students work in the kitchen, do meal planning, budgeting. They learn how to read and follow recipes, safely cook healthy food for themselves and they learn how to use the equipment in the commercial kitchen.
These are special kids. They all have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which describes a range of physical, mental, behavioural and learning disabilities resulting from having been prenatally exposed to alcohol. It usually isn’t diagnosed until children start having problems in school.
It is the most common developmental disability in Canada and West Coast is Vancouver’s only specialized school for kids aged 13 to 19 with an IQ over 70.
The majority of the students come from the Downtown Eastside. Some live in group homes, while one lives in youth housing on the top floor of the Broadway Youth Resource Centre.
West Coast shares the centre’s second floor with another alternative school, Eagle High, which has a full academic program up to Grade 10. It’s where Keewatin is transferring to in January.
The centre is operated by Pacific Community Resources, a non-profit society that’s funded by the Vancouver school board, the Ministry of Children and Family Development and Vancouver Coastal Health.
The fully equipped kitchen is on the centre’s main floor, down the hall past the multi-purpose room, lounge and offices.
The goal for West Coast is to have students reach their highest potential, whether that’s completing a few modified high school courses, getting job skills or even just gaining life skills that will keep them safe and allow them to function more easily in the community.
The cooking program isn’t part of the curriculum even though it means some students can earn their Food Safe certificates, which are required for anyone working in food services.
The program exists only because teachers Dustin Thorkelsson (he's in the photo wearing his frog apron) and Yann Arnold (aka Mr. A) scrounge money and food from here and there for the Wednesday lunch, just like they do for the cereal and milk that they set out every day and the stashes of granola bars in their desks for kids who have missed both breakfast and lunch.
Without them, there would be no Wednesday lunches. No chance to learn enough kitchen skills to look after themselves and no chance to get Food Safe certificates so they can work in food services.
They need help. They’ve applied to Adopt-A-School for $2,600 to cover the food. It’s a meagre budget of little more than $3 a student a week.
And that’s all they’ve asked for.
But when pressed for a wish list, they both said it would be nice if they had money to put together some hampers for half a dozen of those families who won’t likely have much to eat around the holidays.
And, at some point, they said, wouldn’t it be nice if their special kids had something more than cereal for breakfast?
OUR 2015 CAMPAIGN IS CLOSED. PLEASE SEE OUR MAIN PAGE (https://fundrazr.com/profiles/vancouver-sun-childrens-fund) FOR OUR CURRENT CAMPAIGN.
THE 2011 SCHOOL YEAR had barely begun at Admiral Seymour elementary when teacher Carrie Gelson, frustrated after a difficult day at work, wrote an impassioned open letter to Vancouver residents questioning whether anyone cared about her inner-city students who were coming to school with empty tummies and holes in their shoes.
On the day The Vancouver Sun published her letter, when she arrived at the East Vancouver school, “People had already dropped off thousands of dollars in cash by that time.”
So we told her story, introducing readers to her children. And because you began donating money, clothing, school equipment and field trips, by the spring of 2013, the donations were close to $1 million to Adopt-a-School. The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund matched some of those donations for a total of $1.3 million.
Because of you, hundreds of Vancouver-area schoolchildren now have boots to wear in the rain, warm breakfasts and are experiencing things they would never have otherwise.
For more than three decades, you have enabled The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund to raise than $11.5 million, of which more than $7 million has been distributed to nearly 1,000 non-profit children’s charities in B.C.
The season of giving is once again upon us, and we're hoping you'll contribute to Adopt-a-School to keep alive this great legacy that we both started so many years ago.
