Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

It’s national teacher appreciation week and although this is the last day today, I wanted to share the great idea that my son’s Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) had because it is both easy and creative. Maybe some of you can share it with your own PTAs or PTOs. His PTO designated a different gift idea for each day of the week and asked parents to do as little or as much as they wanted. Monday was chocolate day. My son has six teachers so we bought six jumbo Hershey bars, one for each of them. Tuesday was school supply day. I personally think Post–it Notes are very useful, so I bought a few packs in bright colors for each teacher. Wednesday was flower day. I asked my son if he wanted to get flowers for all his teachers or just the female ones. He has three male teachers and three female ones. He chose to get flowers just for the ladies. I bought a bunch of roses and wrapped a stem for each teacher in a wet paper towel covered in aluminum foil to keep the water from getting...

This year if you were to visit a class of 40 students, on average by the end of the year ten of those 40 students will have dropped out of that school. In a school of two thousand students, that would be five hundred dropouts. Frightening numbers, aren’t they? General Colin Powell founded America’s Promise Alliance over a decade ago. In 2010, America’s Promise launched the Grad Nation campaign to fight back against the dropout trend.   According to the America’s Promise Alliance website: Grad Nation is a large and growing movement of dedicated individuals, organizations and communities working together to end America’s dropout crisis. Grad Nation goals include achieving a 90 percent graduation rate nationwide by 2020, with no high school graduating less than 80 percent of its students, and regaining America’s standing as first in the world in college completion.Grad Nation is a 10-year initiative focused on mobilizing Americans to end the dropout crisis and ensure that youn...

Yesterday my son and I went shopping for school clothes. You would have thought I was torturing him the way he complained. Florida also had a tax free weekend for school supplies and clothing last weekend. We had returned from being out of town that Sunday so we ran over to Walmart at 7 p.m. that night to get his composition books and pencils, too.   From my Facebook page, I can see that some of the children of my friends are already in school. My son starts next week. So, it’s time to start thinking of teachers, schedules and homework again. Amidst all the preparation, you will see boxes in major chain stores like Walmart asking for school supply donations for needy kids.   It’s an easy way to donate. Just pick up a few extra boxes of pencils and reams of paper at the same time you’re shopping for your own children while most of these items are on sale. However, there’s another group of kids who need supplies just as much as the older ones—preschoolers. We have a ...