United Way of Wyoming Valley President and CEO Bill Jones shows reporters the contents of a box assembled to be sent to a Nurse’s Pantry, an in-school resource located at 21 school buildings across the valley to provide at-risk children with hygiene and health products at no cost.
Kevin Carroll | Times Leader
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A closer look at some of the supplies that will be sent to school districts around the area for kids in need.
Kevin Carroll | Times Leader
Signs around the United Way of Wyoming Valley office demonstrate the organization’s goal to address childhood poverty and help at-risk children.
Kevin Carroll | Times Leader
United Way of Wyoming Valley President and CEO Bill Jones recently recounted the story of two young boys who were found to be alternating the days of school that they would be attending.
Initially, Jones said, school officials assumed that one of the boys had to stay home to watch a younger sibling, perhaps. The real reason was much simpler, and much more sobering to hear.
“There wasn’t another child at home,” Jones said. “The boys were alternating what days they would attend school because they were sharing the same pair of sneakers.”
It’s this type of need, situations as dire as one pair of sneakers for two students, that the United Way has dedicated itself to addressing and alleviating throughout the Wyoming Valley.
“One out of every four kids in the Wyoming Valley is growing up in poverty,” Jones said. “The more that we can help families, the more that those kids and those families will do better.”
This time of year, with schools across the valley set to begin class this week, is often an especially difficult time for families dealing with economic insecurity.
Between school clothes, packed lunches and various supplies, with the added stressor of rising prices thrown in, making sure your kids are ready and prepared for the school year isn’t always such an easy process.
That’s where the United Way comes in: through a number of programs geared toward assisting families, the organization works with schools to make sure that children in need of supplies are taken care of.
The fruits of one such program were evident inside the United Way office on Tuesday: boxes and boxes, over 100 in total, were stacked around a conference room.
Each box was filled with supplies, including hygienic products like toothbrushes, deodorant and more, and were marked with the name of a different school.
Gathered as a result of the United Way’s Helping Kids Thrive Drive held in July, the boxes of supplies were slated for delivery to 21 different school buildings across seven different districts in the valley, each with a Nurse’s Pantry that will provide at-risk students with health and hygiene products at no cost.
“The schools know which kids need help getting these supplies,” Jones said. “The kids will get what they need, so they fit right in … hopefully, it’s a good start to the school year.”
Addressing these issues with at-risk children will also help address several other issues that the United Way has seen in students, including chronic absenteeism and students falling behind in school.
To make this point, Jones recounted another story, this one of two students who were sent home from school because of head lice.
When looking into the situation, officials from the school realized that the students hadn’t returned to school when expected because their grandmother, with whom the students lived, had to wait to cash a Social Security check before they could afford the proper treatment.
These types of things impact the whole experience for a student, with issues arising from poverty, through no fault of their own, keeping them out of school and thus making it harder for them to keep up.
“If kids don’t have hygiene items, if they don’t have the right clothing or shoes … if they don’t have these types of things, they tend to miss school,” Jones said.
“We look at how much school is being missed not because they [the two students sent home for lice] were sick but because they were poor, and we try to develop solutions to those problems.”
Those solutions come to pass in the form of functions like the Thrive Drive, and other programs offered by the United Way that promote things like reading literacy and attendance awareness (September is Attendance Awareness Month, to that end), all with a shared goal: keep kids healthy and on the right path.
“There are so many barriers for kids to do well in school,” Jones said. “If we could eliminate some of those barriers and kids could do better in school, the hope is that they will do better in life.”
Many of the Nurse’s Pantry boxes collected by United Way have already made their way to school districts, with plenty more in line to be sent out to districts across the area, as well as Wilkes-Barre’s McGlynn Center.
What made the Thrive Drive possible, and such a crucial component of the United Way’s success in helping at-risk families, is the time and generosity of the businesses and individuals who donate their time, their money and their supplies to the cause.
“So many of these companies are so generous because they’ve heard our story over the years and they know how important their help is in addressing the needs of these kids,” Jones said.
“It’s really such a big deal … all of this happens because of the generosity of our donors.”
