Children's futures on the line: will you help?

We need the support of Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District residents with three key initiatives. As we start the 2018-2019 school year, we have in excess of 1,000 students in District 196 who do not have access to enough food on weekends, books to read at home during the summer and instruments to play in the band. The number of students needing help continues to grow. The District 196 Foundation focuses on filling critical needs across District 196. To achieve its mission, the District 196 Foundation must raise $145,000+ annually for three of its programs:

Weekend food

When students go to school on Monday after not having much to eat over the weekend, it affects how well they do in school. Educators who regularly see children come to school hungry describe a host of problems: inability to concentrate, tiredness, lack of energy or motivation, behavioral problems, poor academic performance and students feeling sick with headaches and stomachaches.

Hunger doesn’t just affect kids. Over the long term, as students struggle with hunger in classrooms, it affects us all. Food is one of five basic needs. If students are not eating, they cannot learn.

Nearly one in five U.S. students face the threat of hunger and teachers see its effects in the classroom. An estimated 200,000 youths in the state of Minnesota experience food scarcity. Of those, 100,000 live in the Twin Cities metro area.

In District 196, 23 percent of students live in poverty. Of these, 17 percent experience food scarcity, not knowing when or where their next meal will come from.

During the 2017-18 school year 1,115 students at all 34 buildings in District 196 participated in the weekend food program through Minneapolis-based The Sheridan Story. It costs $215 to provide a bag of food for a student throughout the school year. We are striving to raise $100,000 this year to support our District 196 students in need of weekend food.

Summer Literacy

The District 196 Foundation also is involved in the Summer Literacy Program. Research spanning many years shows that students lose ground academically when they are out of school for the summer. The problem is particularly acute among low-income students who lose, on average, more than two months in reading achievement in the summer which slows their progress toward reading proficiency.

Learning loss can be recognized as early as the first grade. By the fifth grade, learning loss can leave low-income students up to three years behind their peers.

District 196 plans to provide at risk students with 10 new books, at the student’s reading level, to read over the summer. Students pick out the books they like from a variety of books and get to keep them permanently. Many of the students have not had the privilege of having their own books, much less new books. The District 196 Foundation has been helping fund these books and the goal is to raise $36,000 to support the summer literacy program in 2019.

In the past fiscal year, the Foundation donated books to nearly 400 students in District 196.