Franklin Tech And Joplin Schools Present Check To Christmas Of Hope!

A check was presented to Fostering Hope Monday from Franklin Tech. You will understand why shortly. But first a little background…

Over ten years ago, NewsTalk KZRG partnered with Fostering Hope, a local charity to help foster children at Christmas time. Sarah Burch, executive director of Fostering Hope, describes what Fostering Hope is all about, and how they got involved with Christmas and kids.

“We’re a nonprofit organization that really just tries to find ways to support our local foster care community. Typically, that is providing items to kids in foster care that they might need, during the year. That’s clothes, shoes, beds, things like that. At Christmas time, we want to try to help, and foster families a lot of times have a lot of kids in their home. It’s their own kids, adopted kids, foster kids. So we just want to come alongside them and support them at Christmas time when we know budgets are tight and this is a great way to do that.”

Ms. Burch has had an ongoing conversation with NewsTalk KZRG about their seasonal program and longstanding partnership with Franklin Tech, where she met Lorin Curtis, a local construction and equipment teacher at Franklin Tech and Joplin High, who had heard a news story we reported on around that time about a seasonal program to help foster kids at Christmas time. The rest, as they say, is history.

Burch: “So the program’s called Christmas of Hope. We’ve been part of Christmas fostering. Fostering Hope has been part of Christmas of Hope since its inception. We kind of took it over, I would say maybe 12 years ago. And then Mr. Curtis and his students and the school have been involved for almost 10 years. They’ve been dominating part of this for a long, long time. And every year, they go just above and beyond to raise funds, get the students here involved. And my favorite thing about it is it’s, it’s, you know, kids helping kids in our community.”

Here’s what Mr. Curtis had to say Monday when he and his students presented Fostering Hope and Ms. Burch with a check for $5,555 made out to Christmas of Hope: “Well, we’re giving Christmas of Hope a check from Joplin Schools and Franklin Tech. Our whole school district is involved in this. We’ve been doing this almost 10 years now. I think we’ve raised a lot of money. Our goal is always $5,000. We’ve always met that goal. We’ve exceeded that goal several years.

“There’s over 600 foster kids in our area at this time of the year. So our goal here at the school is to raise. Try to get each class to raise $50 in each class. So. And then, like I said, it goes out to the district. Our administration has it. Our Franklin office up here has it. Building and grounds gets it. So this is district wide that we do this with.

“When we first started, I came in and asked my boss if we could do something like this. So the first year, we just did Franklin Tech only. And I think we raised 12 or $1,500 that first year in like seven days. And then we spread it to the school and slowly got it out to everybody.”

Great Job!

If you want to learn more and get involved, go to www.fostering-hope.com.