Donors help Charlie’s Closet keep Tupper secondary students well dressed
A year ago Charlie’s Closet was almost bare – just two used T-shirts on a rickety clothes rack in a small storage room at Tupper secondary school in east Vancouver. Hardly an inventory to be of much help for impoverished students needing socks, underwear, coats, pants, jackets, shirts or shoes. “We didn’t have much. I […]
Canucks coach Willie Desjardins returns to class to talk to kids about teamwork
A qualified social worker and holder of two teaching degrees, Willie Desjardins has a curious background for a National Hockey League coach. But it showed to good effect Friday in the lunch room of Grandview Elementary School, where in the midst of 160 children, the coach of the Vancouver Canucks looked as comfortable as he […]
A closet for students who don’t have one at home
There are some students attending Vancouver’s Sir Charles Tupper Secondary who own their own cars. And there are some who own only the clothes on their backs. The gulf that exists between those two groups needs no exploring. “Kids with cars? Yes. I remember seeing one kid broken down who didn’t know how to use […]
CABE looks after teen mothers and their children
For many Grade 12 students, graduation year is a hectic but fabled time of anticipation and excitement as the world beyond the classroom waits. But for Vanessa Ellingson — the head and breadwinner of a family of three — the thought of leaving the security of Coquitlam’s smallest secondary school fills her with dread. “I’m […]
Providing for young moms — and babies
Kayci is 16 weeks old and her mother Shakayla Bowe is 16 years old — a symmetry of weeks and years that will never come again. And if those numbers suggest this is a child looking after a baby, the ready smile on the baby’s face shows that this is a child as tender in […]
Canucks icon Trevor Linden scores with inner-city school
The largest collection of Canucks jerseys seen so far this fall were one the backs of kids and teachers stuffed in the gym of Surrey’s Mary Jane Shannon elementary in honour of Trevor Linden, who came to the school Thursday to support The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-a-School campaign. Most of the shirts sported the iconic number […]
Vancouver Rotary Club feeds hungry kids at Norquay Elementary
A few years ago there was a feeling within the Vancouver Rotary Club that perhaps it was time to redirect its charitable energies to something other than providing breakfast for hungry children attending east Vancouver’s John Norquay elementary school. “We’d been doing it for a long time and some people felt we should move on […]
Best Buy donates musical instruments, bringing rock’n’roll to Burnaby school
The well-to-do can wear jeans full of holes but for a poor boy jeans ripped almost to the crotch and held together by pins and embarrassment are a stigma, not a fashion statement. “It was certainly difficult for him to have to come to school like that,” said Hal Wall, principal of Burnaby’s Morley Elementary; […]
Surrey breakfast program gives kids food for thought
In September, the Surrey school district took the hesitant step of providing a breakfast – of sorts – to almost 600 hungry children in eight inner-city schools where the poverty rate in some neighbourhoods is an astonishing 80 per cent. The hesitation was due to a lack of money to provide proper breakfasts and concern […]