Steel-high kindergarten ‘sole’ man: Mom will be ‘very, very proud’ of donated shoes, his first this year
STEELTON, Pa. (WHTM) — Most kindergarten children can take for granted the idea they’ll have new shoes to start the school year and again whenever they wear out the old ones.
Dimitri Peters is not one of those children. Nor are many of his classmates at Steelton-Highspire Elementary School, where — principal Megan Armstead said — 95 percent of families live in poverty.
But Dimitri and about 350 others — kindergartners, sixth-graders and children in the autism support classrooms — have shoes now after a donation Wednesday morning by an organization called Soles4Souls.
“The kids’ faces — just getting a new pair of shoes, you really see them light up,” said Stephanie Whitmore, a senior director of business development with the organization. Whitmore — in town for the National Shoe Retailers Association (NSRA) “Footware Forum” in Hershey — said data indicates good shoes support better school attendance and increased participation in extracurricular activities.
“I had a kid over there just tell me, ‘This is going to be my only pair of shoes this school year,'” Armstead said. The kid turned out to be Dimitri, who said his new shoes will make his mother “very, very proud.”
Soles4Souls is supported by the NSRA and the shoemakers’ New Balance and Feature.
Armstead said choosing which grades in the school of 770 children would receive the 350 pairs of shoes wasn’t easy, but she figured the kindergartners could finish their first year on the right foot, and the sixth-graders would have a nice graduation present.
Whitmore said the donations were part of a Soles4Souls program called “For Every Kid,” which focuses on school districts with high rates of children experiencing homelessness and poverty.
“There are good people in the world who want to support our kids,” Armstead said. “We just have to look for them and grab onto those opportunities, because our students are the ones who benefit from it.”
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