High School Looking for Community Funds

The reason for this letter is to ask for your help in whatever ways you can provide to support to our local high school. We are operating on a shoestring budget under the state’s weighted student formula that, this year, provides barely sufficient funds to run a small high school such as ours.

So far in the current school year, teachers have received no funds at all for classroom supplies much less for new classroom books. From basic items such as staples, pens, and glue sticks to higher cost equipment and supplies such as printer ink, teachers are buying needed items out of pocket, borrowing from colleagues, or just doing without.

You can provide a big service to our current students by looking around your house for mislaid school workbooks and textbooks and dropping them off at the high school, or for that matter, at the public library or at any one of the elementary schools on island. We just do not have the money to replace these books, and we need your help.

If anyone is looking for an end of the year tax write off, or if you’re just feeling generous, may I suggest donating an Amazon gift card to the Molokai High School library. We need new books for our library, but we haven’t the funds to buy them.

Purchasing an Amazon gift certificate at the Amazon site on the Internet is a simple way to help replenish our library’s books, but sending a check for books to the school librarian, Diane Mokuau, also accomplishes the same purpose.

I know that we are all tightening our spending in this hard economic time, but just by helping us recover lost materials is a no-cost way to be a big help to our island kids. For those of you who are more financially comfortable, and who are looking for ways to support your island community, please consider gifting money for books. Thank you, and aren’t we lucky that we can depend on each other!

Nancy Lawrence, MHS teacher