School Bus Driver Bus Rallies Community Around a Sock Drive for Needy Students
Martha Alvarez (right) oversees donations generated by the Warm Toes Sock Drive.
One morning last February, Martha Alvarez pulled out of the bus barn of Traverse City Area Public Schools in Northern Michigan as she’s done for almost two decades. It was 18 degrees outside.
“In cold weather like that, I get my students inside the bus as efficiently as possible, especially the little ones,” says Alvarez. When a kindergartener boarded the bus at one of the last stops, she was in tears. Her feet were cold, she told Alvarez.
“It was a Thursday,” says Alvarez, who sat the five-year-old girl near a heater and immediately noticed through a broken zipper in the child’s vinyl boots that she was not wearing socks. “It shook me up visibly, really bad.”
Alvarez instructed the girl to find her school’s lost-and-found box for a pair of socks, then telephoned the principal “so I knew she’d be taken care of.”
After parking her bus, she approached her supervisor, Tyson Burch, and asked if there was something she and the other drivers could do to help the child and her family.
Burch said: “What would you like us to do?”
“I couldn’t answer him, but I knew I was going to do something,” says Alvarez. “These are our kids and we have a responsibility for them that goes beyond just transporting them safely to and from school.”
It didn’t matter why the kids didn’t have socks. Maybe it was due to poverty or neglect. What mattered was that they needed socks to stay healthy and be ready to learn” – Martha Alvarez
That day, Alvarez mentioned the kindergartener to other school staff and was shocked to learn that there were many students attending school without socks, or with mismatched or worn-out socks. On the drive back to school the next morning, Alvarez asked bus passengers if they needed warm socks. About six hands shot straight up on her first route with another six on her second route. She carries about 45 students on each route.
“That was it,” says Alvarez, a Michigan Education Association (MEA) and NEA board member and graduate of the Leaders for Tomorrow program sponsored by NEA’s Education Support Professional (ESP) Quality Department.
“If I’ve learned anything from my MEA and NEA leadership training, I’ve learned that you need to be part of the solution to help students,” she says. “It didn’t matter why School Bus Driver Bus Rallies Her Community Around a Sock Drive for Needy Students:
