Each year when the month of December rolls around, students at MHS will pick a child in foster care to provide with Christmas gifts. The presents can range from clothes to toys, or even just a kind donation of a few dollars.
The PALs teacher, Dan Marlin, is in charge of this program, and he has been at MHS for the past nine years. He has been working in Midway ISD for 20 years, and enjoys this tradition every time it rolls around, he said.
According to his knowledge, the person who began this program was Gail Howerton Wood, the first PALs teacher at MHS.
This year the amount of children ‘adopted’ is much lower than usual, from a typical 100 kids to about 60 this year. There are two possible reasons for this. “I don’t know if it’s because they have someone new in charge of Waco CPS, or that there are less children in foster care,” Marlin said.
His hope with the program is that each student who contributes to making their kid’s Christmas special, whether it be by purchasing a gift, donating money for presents, helping to wrap up the presents, or his PALs students who help deliver the presents, that they know how far their kindness reaches.
“I have heard from so many foster families over the years about how thankful they are for this program and for the students and staff members at MHS,” he said.
There’s a lot of planning that goes into this exchange, but after hav- ing done this for almost a decade, Marlin has it down to a “T.”
To set this up, he meets with Waco CPS to arrange a time line for delivery of the letters to the high school, distributing the letters to the teachers, and the collection and organizing of the gifts. Then they work out a delivery date for the PALs to bring the presents to the CPS office, which is usually the Friday before final exams week. Finally, he checks out a bus, loads up the presents with his PALs II students, and heads out to the office to deliver Christmas cheer.
A student in Jennifer Kolb’s third period graphic design II class made a generous donation. Rowan Daniell, a junior, had his mother drop off a bag filled with gifts for their kid. He brought in everything that a small child would need to have a great Christmas just like the rest of the kids, in hopes that she has a perfect holiday, he said.
“I was thinking about the child and how unfortunate it was for them to spend Christmas without loving and caring parents,” Daniell said. “I wanted to help as much as I could because I couldn’t imagine them spending their first Christmas without their parents.”
Whether their kid was an infant or a teenager, he wanted to provide her with a Christmas to remember. “Even though she’s a small child, I want her to remember this Christmas as a normal and cheerful Christmas,” he said.
