School was interesting growing up because the kind of school you were in really depended on the county. You know, certainly if you were in a military school, it had to do with what was going on in that base. But in the American — United States school system, whether or not your school was a good one or a bad one had to do with what the tax bracket was of that particular county you lived in. So because we moved around, sometimes we’d be in a really terrific school system like in Fairfax County or Westchester County. And there were other times we’d be in places where they, you know, weren’t quite keeping up just because of the population.
I mean, it’s an interesting thing for me because I work with Save the Children’s U.S. Programs, which really is about trying to fix the disparity in U.S. education. In fact, there’s a huge
You know, we’re all promised the same education, but we don’t receive it. And it’s something that I saw firsthand growing up. You know, going from a school where everybody was excelling and thriving to a school where maybe there wasn’t quite enough money for supplies. There weren’t as many teachers. There was overcrowding. And so this is happening when I was growing up. So you can imagine, you know, what’s happening now in our school system.
Basically what Save the Children does in the U.S. is go into areas where there’s not enough support economically and offer support to the area in terms of employment and preschool programs and after-school programs and literacy enrichment and book donation. And often, too, at some of these very rural communities, the school system is the major source of employment as well. So you’re also giving people jobs within that community.
And then I founded a Valentine’s Day program a few years ago that was really about — I was very influenced by UNICEF actually, the Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF that’s about kids helping kids here in the United States to raise awareness of poverty and that disparity in education right here. And, you know, by talking about poverty and having these Valentine’s Day cards and then also by, you know, kids all
It’s a huge kids’ holiday. You always have to buy the valentines. You may as well buy something where the money is going to help other children in the United States.
