Our students and staff were busy for the last day and a half calling as many of you as we could! And God has richly blessed through your generosity and our combined prayers.
Our campaign for a bus upgrade was a popular target of giving. Possibly because we have a pledge to match donations dollar for dollar up to $25,000. That pledged money does not show up on the slider bar pictured.
That means that we have actually raised 16% of the needed funds to replace our bus. This is a much needed campaign is the age of our current bus means frequent repairs. And replacement parts are nearly impossible to obtain at times.
As you can see, our campus safety package was not nearly as attractive to donors.
However, this is equally important. In the past, because of storm damage, we have been out of electricity for as much as a week. During that time, everything in our refrigerators and freezers became unusable. So, we need 3, 3 phase generators to protect our food supply at the school and the Country Store. One would also provide fresh water to the main buildings.
The second part of this package is an upgrade to our fire alarm systems in the dorms. We do have working fire alarms. But they are not connected. We need to upgrade them so that when one is triggered, the entire dorm is aware.
Finally, we want to improve our storm shelters. Currently, we have two small shelters behind the dorms. They are safe. However, they are not big enough.
Last month, we had one night with a continuous storm front moving through. It spawned numerous tornadoes that came within two miles of campus. Ideally, we would have had shelters comfortable enough so the students could have stayed in the shelters until that entire storm front passed.
What we envision is moving the shelter from behind the girl's dorm next to the one behind the boy's dorm. We would then make a water tight crawl space between them. That would double the space for the boys.
For the girls, we would love to provide them with a shelter comfortable enough to even use it as a study area. We are convinced that it should also have a working bathroom. That would hopefully alleviate the fear that some of our students have of crawling into a dark pit in the middle of the night.
As you can see, our donors love our students. We do too! So we totally understand why this has been the favorite campaign of our donors. We thank God for your generosity toward each of them.
As you can see, we still have a long way to go to complete our campaigns. But, you can still make a difference. Last year, we received donations through January for our Giving Tuesday campaigns. We understand if you cannot donate at this time. But when the time is right, we ask you to prayerfully consider going to our donate page and making a contribution.
God bless!
Comments