Teacher Jacquelin Macmillan can’t say enough about the supplies she found available to her, free-of-charge, when she started her job at Bruce Monroe Elementary School in the Parkview neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

“It was like my birthday downstairs with all the presents and supplies,” she says. She’s referring to a supply room in the school that is filled with school and office supplies. That room and everything in it is the result of a partnership with an organization called Strategies to Elevate People (STEP), and World Vision.

Since 1992, World Vision has worked alongside STEP providing items such as school supplies, office supplies, office furniture, and clothing to help STEP achieve its goal of breaking the cycle of poverty in families and the community. “They have helped impact what we do in a tremendous way because of the needs that our families have,” says Jim Till, executive director of STEP. “Without the support of World Vision he says there would be a great void. I don’t know of any other resource we have for getting these types of things.”

STEP provides one-on-one tutoring for students attending Bruce Monroe Elementary and Raymond Elementary. The tutoring focuses on the educational and relational parts of their program. They also offer weekend mentoring, matching a student with an adult. STEP has weekly Bible clubs that the students must get a permission slip signed by their parents to attend.

Vice Principal of Bruce Monroe, Irina Malykhyina, says that 95 percent of the school’s students are on free and reduced lunches.
You can help children in the National Capital Area overcome poverty with education.
In the fall of 2008, La Shada Hamm, the principal of Raymond Elementary, first was introduced to World Vision through Jim Till. The students got uniforms and then the school received pallets of school supplies. In the spring the school got another donation, which helped see them through the end of the year.  La Shada says that all the supplies the school received were useful and needed.

A Washington Post article states that in 2006, 86.7 percent of the students attending Raymond Elementary School were from low-income families.

La Shada says that by being freed up from having to purchase basic supplies such as paper, pencils, and notebooks: “…it allows us to be more creative and it allows us to create more flexibility.” She says that each year they spend thousands of dollars on those basics, which were just handed over to them this past year. Raymond Elementary used that money to buy computers for their classrooms instead.

These types of supplies have also been a big help at Bruce Monroe Elementary School. Irina Malykhyina says “A lot of [the students] live in project housing, public housing, which means that there is no resources of funds or money at home to purchase things that are absolutely basic and necessary.” She was a teacher herself for 20 years and knows that if a student doesn’t have pen, pencil, or paper, it’s difficult for a teacher to teach.

I’m not sure that this school (Bruce Monroe)
ever got their school supplies last year except
what World Vision furnished and that was
at spring break. There’s just always a great delay                                                         – Jim Till

At the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year, teacher Jacquelin Macmillan and her teaching partner had 42 students. Of those, only 15 brought in supplies from the list of required school supplies each student and their parents received.

Through the partnership between STEP and World Vision, those resources are available to the teachers. They don’t have to spend their own money, nor do they have to rely on the parents to provide those items, which they often cannot afford.

Now that Jacquelin knows about the resources available, she lets other new teachers know what they have at their disposal. She asks them, “Would you rather spend all your time hunting for resources or using the resources to find new ways to teach the kids?”

Any time she needs something that she can’t find at the resource center, she starts a list and presents it to the people at STEP who usually are able to get what she needs.

“This year has been so much easier to know that if I want to do a project, I can do it because there’ll be more resources to come.” Jacquelin is especially fond of the chart paper—large tablets of paper that can be seen from the front of the classroom. She encourages students to do their projects on these. That way the students can go back throughout the year and look at previous lessons.

Knowing that she always has access to these resources helps her get out of the hoarding mentality. She used to try to save materials up for extra special projects with the students, never knowing whether she’d be able to replenish her supplies. Now she can provide her students with those extra special projects all the time.

“They’re going to remember doing this for a lot longer than they would if they fill out a worksheet,” Jacquelin says. “I want to make sure that a year from now the kids will still remember what they learned.”

Through the generosity of World Vision’s donors, the children in this community in Washington, D.C. get to experience the type of classroom setting that makes learning more fun and helps them receive a better education. “I think it’s very important that we work together,” says Irina Malykhyina. “It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a village to educate a child.”

You can help children in the National Capital Area overcome poverty with education.
By Laura Reinhardt
July 2009
Washington, D.C.