My students are nearly all native Hawaiian, and they attend what is widely known as one of the worst schools in our state. Our school has a well known reputation that sadly causes most people to simply write off our kids as a lost cause.
All of our students receive free lunch, and many live in low income housing.
We even have a number of students that live in the local shelter, or in tents on the beach. Because of the way that public schools receive funding, our school is always scrimping by with the bare minimum in supplies and resources, leaving our students shortchanged at school as well as at home.
My Project
My guitar class has 26 donated guitars that have no case or rack to call home. When we first received the guitars a few years ago, they were shipped without cases or stands and our school has no funding to supplement. Thankfully, one of my senior students at that time had the brilliant idea to cut out the sides of the cardboard shipping boxes they arrived in, and using duct tape and strategically placed staples we used these boxes to create guitar cubbies where the guitars have safely lived to this day. Unfortunately, I am being moved from my current classroom to a new room with even less storage space and the cardboard cubbies will not survive the move. The time has come that we need to have a wheeled rack to safely store and transport our fleet of donated guitars.
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