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11/20/2004 9:53:19 AM

Churches work to fill students’ needs

Blythe Wachter
Leader-Telegram Staff

Lakeshore School social worker Ellen Higley said she knows plenty of Eau Claire children with difficult lives.

Some sleep on the floor because their families can’t afford mattresses.

One kindergartner lived too near school to ride the bus, but so far away that he couldn’t reasonably walk there. One reason the boy didn’t come to school was his mom couldn’t afford gas to drive him, said Higley, who arranged for him to ride the bus.

One little guy wore shoes two inches too big because that’s all he had. Higley said when she gave the child a pair that fit, “he thought it was the best thing to happen to him all year.”

Higley is working with a half-dozen church congregations to fill the gaps for children with basic needs not easily met by other organizations — whether that be a bed, shoes, a gas card or other assistance. The churches are targeting schools in central Eau Claire neighborhoods.

“We felt reaching out to children was one way we could be a good neighbor,” said the Rev. JoAnne Juett, pastor of First Baptist Church, 416 Niagara St.

Juett coordinates the Good Neighbor Project, which assists students at Lakeshore, 711 Lake St., and Longfellow, 512 Balcom St. — the district’s elementary schools with the highest proportion of low-income students.

School social workers and other staff identified specific needs, and Juett “really rallied the troops,” said Lakeshore Principal Mary Seitz.

“I just think how wonderful that a real grass-roots, cross-denominational effort can reap such wonderful benefits for the children in our community who really do sometimes lack … advocacy for their needs,” Seitz said.

Poverty is not easily visible in Eau Claire, but the project has heightened awareness of needs within the neighborhoods, said the Rev. Amy Odgren, associate pastor at First Lutheran Church, 1005 Oxford Ave.

“People have been very, very supportive of it,” said Jill Christopherson, director of Christian education at First Congregational United Church of Christ, 310 Broadway St.

They know exactly how the money is used, such as dental work, so they get “a sense of being connected to what they are giving to,” she said.

Juett organized the project in February as a response to the school board redrawing district boundary lines. She said she was concerned that a large number of the students redistributed to Lakeshore and Longfellow come from families receiving some form of assistance.

Children experiencing economic stress were forced to make new friends, meet new teachers and deal with new school requirements, she said.

“If a kid can go to school every day with clean underwear, that’s one less thing to burden them with everything else they have to face.”

Among students’ needs at Lakeshore are hygiene items such as toothpaste, shampoo and laundry detergent, and clothing such as socks, underwear and sweat pants. Kids sometimes have “accidents,” but families often don’t have spare clothing to keep at school so the children can change, Higley said.

The project helps with individual needs too, such as distributing a couple of beds and fixing a washing machine. And the churches have covered families’ medical and dental co-payments.

Recipients’ identities are kept confidential.

The churches donate books and money for an incentive reading program.

“One of my goals is to increase the amount of literacy-building materials in households,” Higley said.

The project has raised around $2,500. Each congregation contributed $300 for the year, Juett said, and individual members donate regularly. A fund-raiser concert is in the works for spring.

“I think for many of us, it’s caused us to re-evaluate our responsibility toward children and their education in this community,” Juett said.

She would like the project to serve as a model for others to do the same thing in their neighborhoods. “Needs exist in every school in this town,” she said.

Higley noted other area organizations also have programs that help needy children, including the Masonic Angel Fund of the Eau Claire Masons Sanctuary Lodge 347, the Clothes for Kids program of the Noon Exchange Club of Eau Claire, and the Warm the Children program of the Leader-Telegram.

Higley is impressed with the community’s generosity, but she also noted these efforts “don’t get at the root of the problem,” which is the need for decent living wages and benefits for working families.

In reaching out to neighborhood students, the congregations are following Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors, Juett said.

“It’s a very simple matter of doing what we as Christians commit to do,” she said.