By Laura Reinhardt

It’s about 45 minutes before the bell will ring at New Start School in Seattle, Wash., but already a few students are hard at work in Bev Mowrer’s science class. They’re learning about biology by creating a paper skeleton, covering them with a dough-like substance called Floam—one of a multitude of school supplies available through World Vision’s teacher resource center—then labeling the bones in the body.

The skeletons are the final project for the biology session of Bev’s class. She allows her students to come up with the scoring for each project and they determined that 50 of this project’s 300 points would come from meeting the deadline. The assignments were due yesterday, but Bev has told the students that she will count them as on-time if the students get them in before this morning’s bell.

Bev helps 17-year-old Joe but when he begins thumbing through his notes, she snatches them away from him. “Joe, you don’t need to keep looking at that,” she says. “You know where [the bones] are.” Joe grumbles then attaches the name correctly.

Bev, an 18-year teaching veteran, began at New Start in the 2008-2009 school year. “I think a lot of my experiences have led me to alternative education. I enjoy teaching and I have a gift for being able to get to the kids,” she says. “I sort of look at it as my Peace Corps years. It’s a place where I can make a difference.”

For many students, alternative schools provide a last opportunity to obtain their high school diplomas. These students have trouble fitting into a standard school environment. Bev says that at New Start School they are “put in an environment where they can function. Their uniqueness doesn’t distract from other students.”
You can help children in the Pacific Northwest overcome poverty with education.
A Better Life
Nineteen-year-old John isn’t content with the two-dimensional assignment given by his favorite teacher. He sculpts the Floam into a three-dimensional skeleton. John is thankful to have a school like New Start. “I appreciate ever day that I come to school and know that I have a second chance in life,” he says. After his sophomore year, he dropped out and spent his time partying with friends and looking for fights when he got drunk.   

Then John says he had an awakening. “I just realized when I turned 18 that I’ve got to change my lifestyle and start doing better in school and think about my future for my family.” He saw his mother carrying the burden of supporting the family of five. John’s father suffers from gout and has been unable to work for the past six years. Every day John’s mother awakens at 3:00 a.m. to get ready for work. She returns home at 11:00 p.m. The family needs the overtime pay she earns from these long hours.

Money for school supplies is limited. John says that after World Vision opened a satellite teacher resource center at his school, his class started to see more supplies. “It helped me to understand that there’s a lot of people in this world that really care,” he says of the people and corporations who made donations.

Somebody Cares
Bev echoes John’s sentiments saying that having access to the school supplies “validates that somebody cares about what I'm doing.” She says that without the supplies from World Vision, she would not have been able to offer the students the opportunities to do hands-on projects like this one.

“We did a student survey and all of them were begging for more hands on. And you can’t do that if you don’t have the materials.” Student Brendon says that the hands-on assignments in Ms. Mowrer’s class “help students to learn better.” By going step by step through creating the skeleton, he now knows the names of the bones.

The school doesn’t have the budget for supplies though. Bev and other teachers always must supplement with their own hard-earned cash. “I can’t believe that there’s an organization that does this. It’s incredible and for programs that have a very small budget, it just means the world,” Bev says.

The economic downturn has affected the families of many of her students. She knows some of the parents have lost their jobs. The children struggle to find employment to help their families to survive. Because of this, a lot of students come to school without basic school supplies. Bev appreciates that having those available in her classroom removes some of the obstacles to the students’ education.


The Little Things
Donations of items such as pencils, notebook paper, copier paper, poster paper, pens, pencils, glue, colored pencils, highlighters, rulers, and graduated beakers have made a huge difference to Bev’s classroom.

Bev offers a huge thank you to the donors without whom she says: “I couldn’t be making the difference I am making with these kids. And I’m making a difference.” She says the school had more students than ever graduate this year.

“Unless you’re in a classroom, you don’t realize how many little things you need, and how those add up,” Bev says. She calls having access to free, top-quality school supplies an incredible gift—especially for a school like theirs that flies below people’s radar. “I still don’t know how [World Vision] exists. It must just be from the bottoms of people’s hearts.”

You can help children in the Pacific Northwest overcome poverty with education.