Northern Westchester Examiner article spotlights the Yorktown High School’s KTKI postcard project!
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Tag Archive for YHS
Yorktown High School Students Work on Global Project
Postcards Still Inspire
Postcards Still Inspire – Yorktown High School is “making a difference!” The inspiration for Kids to Kids International began with the photo of the little refugee boy on the Cambodian border holding a postcard – proof that one postcard can inspire action and make a difference in this world. Building on this inspiration, the Yorktown High School KTKI Club (Yorktown Heights, NY) is sponsoring a postcard drive; with the goal that all 1,200 students will complete one postcard of friendship that can be sent to children around the world (like Japan, Haiti, Thailand, Nicaragua, or here in the U.S. to tornado-impacted Indiana.)
An Update on Haiti from KTKI Ambassador Brady
Yorktown High School for Haiti
We have just returned from a very successful trip to Haiti! The YHS T-shirts and the KTKI postcards were a huge success. What a beautiful country, strong people and spirit. The country seems so very fragile, and it is not obvious who is in charge.
The photo of the little boy with the shirt was taken in an 8 room schoolhouse in Marigot. It is a beachside town, small, near the Renaissance town of Jacmel. The school teaches 475 elementary school kids. A teacher’s salary is $600 for the year. The kids get one hot meal cooked by the mothers (they rotate) which is often their only meal of the day. Each kid is also able to bring some food to his family at the end of the school day. School is in session from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm because it is too hot to try and hold classes. I visited this school after the kids had gone home, so I left the postcards with a colleague who will be sending us pictures of the distribution of the postcards.
The photos of the two girls in the YHS shirts were taken in the small beachside town of L’Acul which is near Leogane. These kids did not attend school and lived in one of the tent cities. This area was about 10 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake and the damage to these villages/schools is severe.
Thank you so, so much for all your work– to YHS, KTKI, French Hill, etc. You brought many smiles to kids in Haiti and it was very humbling and special to witness it!
Brady
Packages Finally Make it to India!
Wanting to help children in an orphanage in India, local students helped KTKI pack 13 friendship boxes and brought them to the local post office. When they found out the shipping cost for the packages would be $1300, we didn’t know how we could afford it. Our High School volunteers pledged to raise the money to pay the shipping bill by running fundraisers at their schools, and with joy returned to the post office to send the boxes to India. (See picture above.)
Children at the Mercy and Grace orphanage were elated to receive their student created picture book and school supplies and sent us a thank you message! (See picture above.)
Dear Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education,
We want to help you with what you have said is “the most pressing issue facing America”…EDUCATION. We are students from Yorktown High School in Yorktown, NY, and our goal is to give as many kids around the world an opportunity to learn more.
Through a non-profit organization, Kids to Kids International, we are sending boxes of student-created picture books and educational supplies to children around the world. Many schools throughout the United States are doing the same – we even have student-created picture books from Dever Elementary School in your hometown of Chicago. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a program like this could be in every school in the United States?
We hope you will check our website www.ktki.org. You can put this program in every school in America and give every student a global voice of peace and friendship. And guess what?! It would not cost a thing…. and imagine what it could do.
So we’ll all be friends,
Jesse Yuan and Laura Victor, Yorktown High School Students
Dear President Obama,
Thank you for encouraging us and reminding us that no matter what we do with our lives, we will need an education to do it. Each and every student has to fulfill his own educational responsibilities.
This is what many of the students attending Yorktown High School, in Yorktown, New York are doing to support you. Through a non-profit organization, Kids to Kids International, we are sending boxes of student-created picture books and educational supplies to children around the world.
We are awakening everyone in our school to help us reach out to the rest of the world in peace and friendship and this will be our contribution for now.
Through education, and learning about the rest of the world, we are seeing what the global problems are and doing something about it. In your recent address regarding education, you asked us some questions and we hope we’ve answered most of them. As far as what a president who comes here in the future says about what we did for our country, we hope He/She will approve. Mostly, we are doing this for our current President.
So we’ll all be friends,
Laura Victor, Jesse Yuan, and Joseph Sloan
Yorktown High School students working with Kids to Kids International
