Blended School Receives Teens for Jeans Grant
Western Eagle Bilingual School is a private blended school in Mayagüez, PR that has been using FlexPoint Education Cloud curriculum since 2010. They recently participated in a national campaign to collect jeans for homeless teenagers sponsored by Aeropostale and DoSomething.org called Teens for Jeans. Read their story here:
As I was reading “Leadership for Students,” published by the National Association of Secondary School Principals for NJHS and NHS Members, I came across a short article about a school in the United States that participated in DoSomething.org’s Teen for Jeans campaign by donating 500 jeans. I thought to myself, we can collect even more than that at our school!
The challenge was on.
In November 2014, we posted flyers and emailed parents about the initiative.
Little by little, bags of jeans came in and students in grades 5-9 began helping me collect jeans around the school. Jeans were counted, folded, and stacked into packs of 10. When we ran out of space in my classroom, we started to pile the jeans in the counselor’s office. By January, the campaign had grown even more and by the third week of school we had collected 1,033 jeans. We had reached our goal! But students and parents continued to deliver. Thanks to parents who donated their time and spacious vans, we proudly donated 2,604 jeans in three special deliveries to the Aéropostale store.
As I prepared and submitted the pictures as evidence of our hard work, I wrote the following message as caption:
This is the first time our school W.A.L.K.S. W.E.B.S. participated in this drive. We are currently 325 students, but we have the spirit of a thousand, and the keen vision of our mascot, the eagle! We feel happy to represent the Mayagüez Community in Puerto Rico. Parents, students, and faculty have joined efforts to make this activity a success. Thanks for the opportunity, and we hope to help out next year!
Then, we waited.
We were enrolled in a worldwide competition! It was nerve wracking to visit the DoSomething.org website and still find out that they were counting jeans. In mid-March, I received a call. I went straight into the office and when I asked the secretary who it was, she told me it was a representative from DoSomething.Org. I literally ran and trembled as I heard the lady’s voice; it was our first interview and she told me she would call the following week to confirm that we had won. And it happened! At a school assembly on March 25th, everyone screamed, laughed, clapped, and cried when it was announced that we were the top collecting elementary school in the country for the national Teens for Jeans campaign, winning a $5,000 grant for the school!
I hope this story inspires educators into guiding students to becoming citizens of a world that craves for a helping hand.
Post by: Jazy Rivera, Western Eagle Bilingual School in Mayagüez, PR
