Foxboro Discretionary Fund – Gift Drive

When The Sage School was founded, we shared space with many agencies in an old school we rented from the Town of Foxboro.  This building is now our permanent home.  One of those agencies was the Foxboro Council on Aging, and the woman who headed that agency, Lorraine Garland, also chaired a local organization called the Foxboro Discretionary Fund.  The school developed a strong relationship with the Council and especially with Mrs. Garland and the Discretionary Fund.  Fifteen years ago, that friendship fostered a continued community service project for Sage students.  The Discretionary Fund coordinates and organizes service to needy families in Foxboro, operating a food pantry, offering heating assistance, rent assistance, and other programs.  Each holiday season, the Discretionary Fund collects wish lists from local children and solicits sponsorship for those children from the community.  As we learned from Mrs. Garland, it is often more difficult to find sponsors for Middle School children versus younger kids, so our very tiny Middle School offered to sponsor one or two.   All of the Middle School students sponsored attend the local Ahern public Middle School, less than a mile down the street from Sage.  Since the start of the project, Sage students engage their parents or neighbors to pay them $10 to $20 for various tasks such as raking, peeling potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner, washing dishes, babysitting, etc.  The students, parents, and the individual student’s faculty advisor sign a contract indicating how the funds will be earned.   After much in-school discussion about the wish lists, the student advisory groups gather the funds, and we travel to a local shopping center to shop for the items on the particular child’s wish list.  Sage students handle all money, have to stay within the budget of the total dollar amount collected, make decisions about what to purchase, and sometimes, make choices about what cannot be purchased.  The group must always make collective decisions.  On occasion, these are hard lessons in cooperation and learning that not every item can be purchased as the groups push their carts around our local Target.  Even with these difficult choices, our students say that this is one of the most rewarding experiences of their Middle School careers at Sage.  In the early years, Mrs. Garland came to speak to the students about the work of the Fund.  Tragically, she was killed in a car accident, yet her daughter, Lisa Downs, has now taken on the work of the Fund, speaks to our students, and helps us with this project.  Our Middle School now sponsors six Foxboro kids, and we have expanded the program so that each of our Junior Division homerooms and administrative support staff sponsor their own children.  This year, Sage School shopped for eleven young people from Foxboro, delivering bags and bags of gifts to the Fund for those local kids.