Back-to-School Safety Tips for Students and Parents

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These aren’t quite the days when kids of all ages were turned loose at dawn to make their own way to school by bus, foot, or bike, but plenty of young students are still given more independence for their commute than they may be prepared for. As students across the country return to school for the 2017-18 school year, police departments everywhere have a few cautions in common.

For students

Make sure that your young student can tell you what the plan is to get them to and from school every day. This is mostly about the youngest kids. Are they always picked up by the same person in the same car? Can they tell you or a teacher the full name of both parents, and what color their car is? If there are custodial issues, do they know their schedule? Do they know your phone number and address? Quiz them until they do—it’s all well and good to have a card in their backpack or data on file with the school, but it’s great to help your young student help themselves.

Also, reinforce your family rules on crossing the street with care, on helmet safety, anything that’s going to be a protection for your child. Make sure you’re following them yourself; your child is watching you for cues.

For parents:

Be careful around schools. You may be running late, stressed, or distracted with your own daily plans, but set all of that aside when you are behind the wheel near any school or school bus. Pedestrian traffic that is mostly minors can be very erratic, and it just takes a second to make a mistake that can’t be undone.

It’s worth it to make time in those first few weeks to arrive early or be able to stay a little late, to get out of your car at the school and meet the staff who manage the bus lines, school administrators, or even the parents of their friends. Making sure you know their faces and they know yours helps protect every student.

Get some other safety tips for students of all ages, and their parents, at the Red Cross website.

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Chicago Charity Distributes Free School Supplies to Low-Income Families

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For some families, sending their young children back to school is a daunting prospect. But it’s not the classes or the hours that’s burdensome; it’s the growing list of school supplies that they must purchase.

Sent out in advance or brought home on the first day, the list of required schools supplies seems a lot longer than it was “back in the day.” And it’s not just pencils and notebooks anymore. It’s flashcards and a specific brand of printer paper. It’s calculators at younger and younger ages. It’s classroom supplies like Kleenex and hand sanitizer that schools can’t afford to supply.

In Chicago, approximately 80% of students enrolled in public schools are low-income, according to the Kids Count Data Center. Fortunately, charities like Back 2 School Illinois are helping to ease the financial strain. On Wednesday, August 9th, Back 2 School Illinois distributed nearly 14,000 free school supply kits to low-income students.

The Wednesday event, which happened at Broadway Armory Park, brought in over 400 students ages 6 to 12 for four hours of educational activities along with the giveaway. Chicago Public Schools’ start date is still nearly a month away (September 6th) but the activities were meant to prime the pump, getting school children excited to be back in the classroom. Also, they were planned far enough in advance that parents would not have already gone supply shopping.

The supply kits came packaged for four different age levels, based on consultation with area teachers. Kits for the youngest grades included crayons, markers, and construction paper. Kits for middle schoolers include math tools, binders, and college-ruled notebooks.

After the event, volunteers delivered thousands of kits to YMCA locations around Chicago, where parents can pick them up any time before September. Back 2 School Illinois hopes to deliver as many as 35,000 by the early months of the school year.

Providing Education for Refugees in Lebanon

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Lebanon is a small country in the tense area between Palestine and Syria. It’s about twice the size of Long Island, NY, and one of the smallest non-island countries in the world.

It’s also host to over one million registered refugees from Syria, according to a 2016 report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They assume this to be low of the actual number, due to constant arrivals, a slow registration process, and an overwhelmed infrastructure. Their estimate of the actual number is closer to a million and a half. That would mean that more than one in five people in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee. And many of them are children.

Being a refugee is intensely disruptive to the life of a child. Many children that flee their home country never enter education again. Right now, over 200,000 Syrian children in Lebanon aren’t enrolled in school.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice, founded in 2016 by Amal and George Clooney, has partnered with international aid giant UNICEF to work on this issue. The foundation is donating $2.25 million dollars to seven public schools in Lebanon.

There’s already a system in Lebanon for providing education to refugees; schools operate in shifts, teaching local students in the morning, then refugees in the afternoons, doubling their capacity. The Clooney’s grant, boosted by a further $1 million from HP for educational technology, will add those seven schools to the pool that can extend their resources.

“Thousands of young Syrian refugees are at risk—the risk of never being a productive part of society,” the Clooneys said in press release on Monday, July 31st. “Formal education can help change that. That’s our goal with this initiative. We don’t want to lose an entire generation because they had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”