Today kicks off the Donors Choose promotional deal at Starbucks. Here's a little snippet from the Donors Choose website explaining a little more about it:
Thanks to a $4 million donation from the Wasserman Foundation, nearly 600,000 families will receive a FREE$15 DonorsChooseLA.org gift card to support a classroom project of their choice. Cards will be available at school sites!Teachers can take advantage of these gift cards that will be distributed to families of your students by logging on at www.donorschoose.org/teachers and posting a classroom project of your choice. Posting a project should take no more than 15 minutes. More than 4,000 teachers have posted classroom projects to DonorsChooseLA.org!
This program has been absolutely wonderful in helping to provide a little relief for our school district at a time when we are in dire need of any and all financial help we can get.
Unfortunately, the Starbucks Donors Choose gift card portion of this windfall has fallen a little short as far as reaching as many needy schools as possible. Actually, it's fallen a lot short. There are ZERO schools in the North West Valley, nor any in the North East. This includes, but is not limited to:
Chatsworth
Granada Hills
Reseda
Northridge
Mission Hills
Sylmar
Porter Ranch
North Hills
Arleta
Pacoima
Lake View Terrace
You can peruse the list in its entirety (listed by zip code) here.
How is this possible? I know, I know... it is forever the lament of the Valley: "Waaah! We never get our fair share!", but in this case, I'm going to have to join the crybabies. Did LAUSD have absolutely no say in the mapping out of these gift card giveaways at Starbucks? Did Starbucks put the kibosh on the "at all Starbucks" wording on the Donors Choose website until just Friday? A reader writes to us that indeed, the website said: "...at all area Starbucks" until Friday morning when it was suddenly taken down and replaced with the list linked above. And what of our representative sitting on the Board of Education, Tamar Galatzan? Did the Board of Ed have any kind of input? And did T.G. ever raise her hand and say, "Uh... hold up, people"? No. I also understand isn't nice to look a gift horse in the mouth -- but when this is a program set out to benefit as many kids and schools as possible, and a huge section of neighborhoods of these children and schools are being overlooked... well, that kinda bugs me.
It should bug you too.
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