Marco Gets a Chromebook!
COVID-19 Hits Arizona Kids Hard
Almost overnight local Arizona schools closed their doors with the spread of COVID-19 quickly increasing in the state. Understanding that the best way to slow the spread of this virus is to limit person-to-person interaction, this meant that Arizona kids of all ages would not complete the 2019-2020 school year in person.
Many school districts reacted quickly to develop a COVID-19 plan- creating online programs while also lending out technology, equipment and devices to their students. However, not every school was able to do this and many kids were left with nothing to connect them to teachers and online learning.
Time to Pivot!
Opportunity4Kids was created to help kids in need with resources to participate in out-of-school time activities, but devastatingly, pretty much all afterschool programs, summer camps and extracurriculars are indefinitely on hold. We could not just stand by and wait for these activities to resume, so we quickly pivoted and thought- why not help with at-home technology? We immediately posted our updated COVID-19 Scholarship application and found Marco!
Marco is a first grader who, unfortunately, was one of the students left without technology. Marco’s mom reached out acknowledging with his ADHD and Autism diagnosis, that at-home learning would be very beneficial for Marco, but that they just didn’t have the technology to support his growing list of assignments and zoom calls.
#TeamWorkMakesTheDreamWork
In posting about our goal to help Arizona kids with at-home technology, one of our long time community partners, Coach JD of Only The Strong Fitness & Athletics reached out to donate 2 brand new Chromebooks for our cause! We are very grateful for this support and were so excited to get the device to Marco.
Executive Director, Alexandra, had the pleasure of delivering the Chromebook to Marco and we are glad he will be able to continue his learning the rest of this year and into the Summer!
