As the school year comes to a close, Secondary 1 students at Beurling Academy in Montreal’s Verdun borough have a learned a valuable lesson they won’t forget this summer.
The Cycle 1 math students’ months-long fundraiser for the homeless community came to a close this week. In total, they raised enough money to donate more than 5,500 pairs of socks and a television to the La Maison Benoit Labre, also known as the Benedict Labre House, a shelter for people living without a fixed address in Saint-Henri.
“Something like this is unbelievable and then the TV I couldn’t believe it. They’re going to be so happy,” said Francine Nadler, a clinical co-ordinator at the Benedict Labre House. “So it’s just really heartwarming to see and these kids are unbelievable.”
Over the course of the year, each class in the project-based learning school focuses on a question to drive student learning. After a meaningful presentation from Nadler about the realities of homelessness, Amandeep Singh Mann’s Cycle 1 mathematics class decided to focus on the issue.
“For us, we wanted to focus on community and connect that to math so for us the question was, ‘How can students at Beurling help support the homeless population of Montreal?'” Mann said.
The visit left a meaningful impact on the students and they started brainstorming ways they could help the shelter.
“We just started coming up with ideas and the socks was a good one because during winter a lot of homeless people get frostbite on their feet because of the cold and they need to protect themselves,” said Secondary 1 student Katelynn Lavoie.
Often people think to donate food, clothes or boots but there is also a pressing need for socks. Nadler says foot health is a “really big problem” for the homeless community.
“When your feet are cold and wet and there’s nowhere to go for them to take off their shoes and dry their feet, they just stay cold and wet and that starts infections,” she said.
With this newfound knowledge, the students organized a fundraiser where they sold coffee mugs they designed with the slogan “Beurling Academy is our name, selling socks is our game” for $10 to buy 20-pair packs of socks.
“At the beginning, it was just a small little thing right? Where it was just we might donate a few hundred socks, maybe. Now it’s just this huge thing and I’m astonished how big the sock pile is,” said Secondary 1 student Ronan Holmes.
The class starting selling mugs at the end of February with the goal of donating 1,000 socks to the school community, which includes parents and teachers.
After initial success, the class made a promotional video and posted it on Beurling Academy’s social media accounts. That’s when Mann said sales really picked up.
“We had parents that would come in and buy 22 mugs, we had some parents come in and buy 20 mugs. We had people (buy mugs) that we don’t even know,” he recalls.
The success of the class project has left a lasting impression on the students, who now say they have learned life lessons they will carry with them forever.
“I’m gonna make sure when I’m older that I always help my community and make sure that every time I see a homeless person to say something nice to cheer up their day,” said Lavoie.