Advocate Online

On the Road
with Rachel Hendrickson

I’ve described NEA’s Outreach to Teach in prior years, but each year it gets more exciting, more inspiring, and I feel I have to tell you about it. This year, just before the start of the NEA Annual Meeting, more than 250 NEA members—higher education, students, ESP, NEA-Retired, and K–12 teachers—worked together to rehabilitate a learning center in St. John’s Parish, Louisiana.

We gathered in the hotel lobby at 6 a.m. in the dark, in 85 degree heat and close to 100 percent humidity and boarded the buses for rural St. John’s. We disembarked at a school campus of about two acres with no trees, bushes, or flowers. The staff who met us were wonderful, but were working with very few resources. The center was set up for Head Start children—4 and 5 years old—so sitting in the cafeteria to get our assignments was a challenge. Well, it wasn’t the sitting so much as the trying to get up afterward.

Seven hours later, we left behind a refurbished campus. Ann Shadwick, Phyllis Hall, and Cecile Bendavid, all from California campuses, helped plant trees and shrubs, paint classrooms, create gardens, build a sandbox, and transform a storage room into a teacher work center. They were joined by children of the staff and members of the community.

When the project is being planned, it’s not unusual for the local school district to be skeptical of NEA’s offer. One year, the principal came out to meet the buses saying, “I didn’t think you would show up.” But in the end, they’re pleasantly surprised by the amount of work 250 dedicated volunteers can do.

Oh, yes, it threatened to rain all day—thunderstorms all around us. But it wasn’t until the last volunteer got on the bus that the skies opened and the new gardens were watered.

— Rachel Hendrickson coordinates NEA higher ed activities.