This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
I teach at a special education center high school for students grades K-12. Our amazing program is located in Detroit, Michigan. We serve students with a wide variety of psychiatric, cognitive, and behavioral needs. We serve students from the entire city of Detroit.
Our school has 50 beautiful young people with varying strengths and weaknesses.
Their backgrounds are as diverse as their abilities. I have students whose parents are my colleagues and students who live in boarded-up houses. Some come from two-parent homes, and some come from three different homes.
We are all unique, but we are definitely a family here.
My Project
Do you remember your favorite holiday meal? Mine was our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of seafood! For some of my students, however, there no "regular" traditions; in fact, they are thankful to have any food at all on holidays.
This year for Thanksgiving, our staff and students will pull together to create a dozen complete Thanksgiving dinner baskets to send home with the neediest 25% of our student population.
This year we are asking for the help of generous donors like you to ease some of that burden as it is difficult to pull from our already struggling Detroit community. We would like to purchase canned goods like greens, fruit cocktail, sweet potatoes, and dry items like rice, pie crust, and aluminum cooking tins, to help send home a complete Thanksgiving dinner in a re-usable laundry basket for our impoverished special needs population.
The parents will personally come to the school to receive the basket, and we very rarely see students parents in our building. This is a wonderful time at our school, of giving and coming together as a community. We just need a little assistance to make it complete! This will allow for the ultimate in parent involvement with the coming together for a holiday meal. Thank you for your consideration!
More than three‑quarters of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Paterson and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
