Chartiers-Houston club helps underprivileged receive education
Members of the Future is Mine club at Chartiers-Houston High School are joined for a photo by advisers Rebecca Vlainich, left, Rachel McBride, right, and Global Give Back Circle founder Linda Latsko-Lockhart, center.
Marchers in the Global Give Back Circle-hosted “Educate HER Parade” carry images of Rachel McBride, a math teacher and her mother, Barbara Latsko.
Girls at Chartiers-Houston High School on Tuesday got to see, for the first time, a young Kenyan woman named Celestine whom they helped send to college.
They are members of The Future is Mine club at Chartiers-Houston, which is run by Rachel McBride, a math teacher, and Rebecca Vlainich, a family and consumer sciences teacher.
“It’s about getting the most out of experiences,” said Jessica Southern, an 18-year-old senior, when describing the club.
In the fall, TFIM partnered with the Global Give Back Circle, a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let Girls Learn” initiative. The circle seeks to help girls break out of poverty and receive an education. TFIM raised $1,000 for the circle, money which allowed Celestine to attend college as an education major.
Linda Latsko-Lockhart, who lives in New York but is originally from Bethel Park, started the circle and visited Chartiers-Houston this week to share Celestine’s story with the club members.
“Today, they’re going to actually meet the young woman they helped,” Latsko-Lockhart said.
Latsko-Lockhart spoke to the students about the poor living conditions for many young girls in Kenya. She said they practice genital mutilation and forced marriage, and explained how Let Girls Learn and the Circle rescue girls from these conditions.
In addition to the money raised by TFIM, some of the club members also “virtually” participated in a parade, called the Educate HER parade, in Kenya hosted by the circle.
Students sent pictures of themselves, which were then blown up and carried in the parade. Southern was one of the students, as was Brianna Palfreyman, a 17-year-old senior.
“It makes me happy to know I’m helping a good cause,” Palfreyman said.
TFIM, which Palfreyman and Southern are both a part of, is not exclusively a Chartiers-Houston program. It is a venture within The Consortium for Public Education, located in McKeesport. TFIM at Chartiers-Houston is one of more than two dozen branches in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
But keeping the club active has had its challenges, which the students were able to overcome.
“We found out they were cutting our funding,” Southern said.
According to Southern, the students came together in order to raise money and keep the club going. Members of TFIM got together with the volleyball team for a fundraising effort.
The success of those efforts allowed TFIM to move forward, and eventually help Celestine receive an education. According to McBride, the club plans on sponsoring another girl from Kenya next year, and that while education is a given for the girls in TFIM, that isn’t the case for girls in Kenya.
“They’re privileged, they have this opportunity to get an education. These girls don’t have that privilege,” McBride said.