Jefferson sixth graders practice compassion, learn lesson in generosity - NorthJersey.com
Sydney Thumser hands Fred Shivdat a copy of the poetry book the sixth grade Blue Team made to raise funds for the Lusignan-Good Hope Learning Center. Sandra Shivdat accepts a book from Lily Snow. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/community-news/clubs-and-service-organizations/sixth-graders-practice-compassion-learn-lesson-in-generosity-1.1030388
Sixth graders are known for wanting to watch movies their parents don’t want them to watch, wanting to wear clothes appropriate for older teens and not wanting to get up for school.
They are not known for their compassion.
That isn’t what Sandra and Fred Shivdat found when they started working with sixth graders from the Jefferson Township Middle School to raise funds for the Lusignan-Good Hope Learning Centre in the Shivdats’ native Guyana.
"You are so young and show such compassion for kids so far away that you’ve never met," Sandra Shivdat told students in Maria Clarizio’s language arts class when she visited on Thursday, May 29.
Clarizio met the Shivdats at a wedding and thought the charity would make a great service project for the Blue Team. That was when the current eighth graders were in sixth. The partnership has continued ever since.
Each year the children create a poetry book as a fundraiser. They write the poems, illustrate the book and sell it.
Clarizio prepared them for writing the book with a unit on Dickens, which was sadly easy to correlate with present-day Guyana.
Dickens wrote fiction, but he had a journalistic point of view when he wrote about Victorian London. His goal was to expose the ill-treatment at the hands of the wealthy of the poor and especially of children. With no child labor laws in the 19th Century, children younger than these middle schoolers were put to work to pay off family debts. While modern-day Guyana, near the Equator, doesn’t have the perpetual haze of coal-fired London furnaces, it is the second-poorest nation in the Americas, after Haiti.
"A Christmas Carol" and "Oliver Twist" set the tone for understanding poverty and a unit on William Cullen Bryant’s poem "The Stolen Child" inspired the kids to write their own poems. Many of the student poems follow the theme of Bryant’s poem, leading a child into a paradise on earth.
Clarizio took advantage of the 50-hour community service requirement at High Point High School and enlisted her daughter, Anna, and two friends to edit and format the poetry book as well as write the forward. The Blue Team was then dispatched to sell the books for at least $4 each. Most asked for far more. It became something of a competition, leading to Kiersten Nicolosi selling one book for $200. Hannah Naiman sold the most books with 34. Sixth graders take them home for their parents to sell at work, hawk them in the hallways and the cafeteria. This year’s class raised $1,839, the most in the 3 years of the fundraisers.
The Shivdats visited to show the children where their money was going. Sandra presented a slide show of the learning center, a small school in a tiny village. The children learned about Guyana in class and created a bulletin board to share their knowledge with fellow students.
In Guyana, most parents can’t send their children to school because of the cost of transportation, uniforms and books. The learning center serves a small geographic area, so the children can walk. Uniforms are not required and Sandra raises money to buy books and supplies.
She explained she left Guyana 31 years ago after the newly independent state seemed to be on the road to ruin. After throwing off British rule, the new ruling class ended up enriching itself and leaving the vast majority of the 760,000 residents in poverty. Neighboring Suriname fared better after gaining freedom from The Netherlands, she said.
Sandra and Fred said they received an excellent education in Guyana, an education now only available to the extremely wealthy. An entire generation has grown up without schooling and without appreciating the value of education and they are now parents who don’t see the importance of sending their children to school. This inspired the Shivdats to start Restoring Hope International, Inc., a 501c3 based in the U.S.
The learning center is serving students who haven’t been to school before or who have only spent a few years in school, reading far below their grade level, Sandra said. In addition, they have to learn simple social norms that have been pushed aside in the survival mode of their families. Virtually everything at the school must be kept locked because the children think nothing of taking books or craft items, even food.
Besides Clarizio, the Blue Team teachers are Carol Gargone, Jim Smith, Lindsay Corter and Heather Smith.
June 6, 2014 Last updated: Friday, June 6, 2014, 12:31 AM
By Jane Primerano
CORRESPONDENT
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