VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION 

Jay Height:
Hi, I’m Jay Height with this week’s Partner Update. And I have a good friend, Todd Huff, who’s with me today, and we’re excited to tell you about the impact we’re making through the help of so many on education.

Todd Huff:
Jay, we’re in a classroom, and one of the components of the things you do here at Shepherd is to educate children. So let’s talk about Education Day and the importance of the things you do here at Shepherd Community Center.

Jay Height:
Yeah, this is a special week. It’s fall break, so the kids are at home, and we’ll talk a little bit about how we help them. We’ll talk about that later, but on each day through the school year, you have kids who fill these seats, and they have names and faces. You’ll hear at this time about percentages and how many kids have their learning loss from COVID. Well, what’s special for me is they have names and faces, and we know them, and we’re able to invest in them. So we’re not talking about numbers, we’re talking about lives, and we want to help our kids each and every one of them move forward. And we set goals. We know that because of COVID that a lot of our kids have gone backwards in their education achievement, but we’re not satisfied to wait. We’ve put together a two-year remediation plan, and Todd, part of it is what happens each and every day in this classroom and in our out-of-school time after school and in the summer. I want to share with you some exciting statistics.

Jay Height:
We participated with 38 other organizations this summer with The Mind Trust and with United Way, and they helped us hire some teachers. And we took our summer camp and spent part of the day working to increase the kids’ achievements. And I’ll share with you those statistics that we recently got. On the English portion of the test, our kids improved their test, so those who took the pre-test and at the end of the summer took the post-test, they improved 31%. And the city average for the other organizations was 14.9, so over double. And then, on the math test, our kids improved 30.5%, and the city average was 16.2. So we were in the top handful of organizations. And we’re excited about that, but we’re not done because we want 90% of our kids to be back at grade level, at least, if not further, in the next two years. And that takes a lot of efforts.

Todd Huff:
It’s not just what happens in the classroom. You’re helping students when they go home as well. Tell us what you have and maybe share some of the contents in this box.

Jay Height:
Yeah, we do this every week. We send home food packs for the weekend for the kids, but this is for our fall break that we just had. We had a church who packed this for them. And so you got Beefaroni and Goldfish.

Todd Huff:
There’s a lot in there. 

Jay Height:
There’s granola bars, peanut butter crackers, and so there’s enough food for them to eat for the week. And there’s these really nice things. They created these little packs. And then each one of these boxes that the kids took home had this note in them that was handwritten by someone at that church. And it says, “Know that God loves you and is always looking out for you.” And I think we want to feed them physically, and we want to feed them spiritually.

Todd Huff:
That’s right. That’s right.

Jay Height:
And so for a student that is in our school, they’re going to get breakfast and lunch here. For those who stay to the after school, they’ll get supper, and then we send food home, but this is a tangible way. We do this at fall break. We do it at Christmas break. We do it at spring break, and we do it through the summer.

Todd Huff:
Well, that’s important. And I can even see there’s individual bags of lunches or meals or snacks in there as well, so that’s really important. So you said a church did this. So maybe a pastor or someone that attends a church is watching right now. How would they get involved with something like this?

Jay Height:
They can contact us here at Shepherd, 317-375-0203, and say, we want to help. We want to figure out how we can get involved. We send home food packs every weekend, not as big as this, but making sure our kids have something to eat. Hunger is an unfortunate reality. And I can’t say it enough. When a kid has a full belly, it’s much easier to tell them that there’s a God who loves him and cares for them.

Todd Huff:
That’s exactly right.

Jay Height:
Todd, appreciate you being with us today. Here at Shepherd Community, we’re on the road to recovery. Won’t you join us?