Burnaby school breakfast program gets boost from group of businesswomen
In 2011, The Vancouver Sun’s Children’s Fund sent $11,000 to Edmonds Community School to pay for breakfasts for the 45 children coming to school hungry every day. “We’ve just about used up that money,” Mischa Greenwood, the school’s community coordinator, said earlier this week. The Burnaby school had only asked for $8,000 from the Adopt-a-School […]
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 […]
Surrey breakfast program feeding hungry students, keeping them in school
“A six-year-old that’s hungry is not a pretty picture.” Pat Horstead’s observation, which creates the disturbing image of childhood cuteness distorted by want, came Wednesday in a small cupboard of an office in Surrey’s Georges Vanier elementary in the heart of Whalley. Horstead, an assistant superintendent for Surrey School District, was explaining why the district […]
From bombs to books; Indomitable spirit of ESL students inspired principal to write book
From the outside, Edmonds community school looks like an ordinary neighbourhood school. But inside, it is a microcosm. Four out of five students were born outside Canada, more than half are learning English as a second language (ESL) and a third are refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Iraq and Eritrea. Their harrowing […]