Joan Donovan, a former Laytonsville Elementary School fourth grade teacher for 35 years, cleaned more than 10,000 bottle caps in her bathtub this summer.
Donovan said the bottle caps are trash to most people, but valuable learning tools to incoming kindergarten students learning to sort and count. So the bottle caps joined rulers, crayons, magnetic letters, play-doh and alphabet cards in school supply kits given by the Montgomery County Public School Retirees Association to more than 1,000 incoming kindergarten students attending schools in low-income areas.
“Once we retire, our love and our dedication to children does not stop,” Donovan, special projects chair for the MCPS Retirees Association said. “This project became an avenue for us to continue to support children.”
The retirees gave the kits to students who completed a summer learning program designed to get kindergarteners ready for the school year. During the summer program, the children mastered the basics of classroom behavior, including how to line up for class, eat breakfast and lunch at school, raise their hands to speak and how to write their names.
“The first day of kindergarten has already been for these guys,” Natalie Thomas, an instructional specialist for Montgomery County Title 1 programs, said. “On the first day of school it will be ‘Bye Mom and Dad,’ there will be no tears, sorry. They’ve already begun to learn some independence during the summer program.”
Donovan said she raised about $15,000 to pay for the kits, with nearly 300 retired school system employees, now living in 38 different states, sending contributions. Corporations and outside groups like State Farm Insurance, the National Education Association, the Women’s Club of Kensington, OBA Bank of Germantown and the Montgomery County Teachers Federal Credit Union also helped fund the project.
“I think these kits are good practice because when they come home we can see if they’re making progress at school,” Lalita Gupta, mother of incoming kindergartener Aniket Sharma, said. “It gives us something to do to make sure they’re still learning when the school day is done. Besides, the play-doh and magnetic letters look like fun.”
