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Four years ago, Kim Leary's Homework Club was in danger of shutting down because there was no money for the food to entice Britannia Secondary students to stay after school and none to get better computers.
But with help from Adopt-a-School, students like Muhaned Shalash and Megan Pakkala (shown above with Leary) are now thriving.
Shalash, 18, plans to go to SFU’s Beedie business school next fall. He came from Iraq when he was 13, and when he arrived at Britannia in Grade 8 he was lost. But in Grade 10, he joined the Homework Club.
“I only came to the Homework Club to eat the food," he says. "My marks — 50 per cent would have been high for me. . . now my average is 85 per cent. This has been like another family for me.”
Before 18-year-old Pakkala joined in Grade 11, she says, "I was hardly ever in the building. I failed every single course.” Now she is averaging 70 per cent, comes to school every day and is planning on going to college.
The Youth Engagement Project runs parallel to the Homework Club. It's for kids described by Leary as having "a super high level of absenteeism, and with a higher level of social dysfunction in their homes and in their lives."
Twenty of those kids are now part of the Youth Engagement Project that runs parallel to the Homework Club. And there are five more are on the waiting list to join.
Assisting Leary are two part-time teachers. Last year, they had their first success: two YEP students graduated Grade 12.
Both girls were refugees suffering from post-traumatic stress and having difficulty with English and integrating into school life. But they graduated in June and are now in hair-dressing school.
This year, four YEP students will graduate. Three will be off to university or college and one to a trade school.
It costs $63,000 a year to run YEP and Leary has applied to Adopt-a-School for $23,000 -- $8,000 of that would be used for food for the Homework Club and YEP.
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.
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