SHS builds classroom in Kenya

By Miriam Ostermann, Associate Editor

Students at Strathmore High School (SHS) are only a few hundred dollars away from completing their efforts to fundraise $10,000 to build a classroom in Kenya.
The school raised the necessary funds to help send one student – Vivian – to school for four years and to build a much-needed classroom in a rural community, through the ME to WE Club.
While it only took the school one year to raise the $10,000 to educate Vivian for the duration of her high school studies, SHS spent the last several years collecting sponsorships through a 12-hour Vow of Silence, bake sales, benefit concerts and a coin drive – one that will take place until June 13.
“It’s really changed their perspective on education. We have a tendency to take education for granted here, especially being able to go all the way through high school, whereas only 50 per cent of citizens in Kenya pass Grade 6,” said Christine Magill, social studies teacher at SHS. “So many kids don’t have access to even primary education and even fewer have access to education after Grade 6. In the rural communities especially, that classroom will give kids a chance to go to school in the areas where the kids currently may not attend school because of the conditions of the classroom or the lack of teachers.”
Magill said the ME to WE Club is a partnership with the Kenya government – the government provides a teacher for every classroom that is built.
The coin drive initiative will hopefully raise the remaining dollars needed. Students can bring in spare change and citizens can also donate spare change or drop off a coin jar to the head office at SHS.
“I think it’s exciting to see youths so passionate and actually feeling that they can make a difference,” Magill said. “I think it’s just really rewarding because a lot of times I think we feel frustrated about what’s going on in the world and we don’t know how to take action. So it shows them ways they can make a concrete difference.”
Magill expects the classroom will be constructed this year, the same year Vivian took to the stage to celebrate her high school graduation. The coin drive will continue at SHS until June 13, with any additional money donated this July for school supplies and materials for teachers and students in the community of Masulita in Uganda.
SHS will also be embarking on a volunteer trip to Ecuador in conjunction with WE Charity – formerly called Free the Children – for the 2018-19 school year.