Monarch Academy students help Kenyan schools

Sixth-grade students at Monarch Academy Glen Burnie raised $2,899.67 to purchase four LifeStraw Community high-volume water purifiers for two primary schools in Kenya, where students sometimes must walk miles to collect unclean drinking water.

To raise money, Monarch Academy students educated their churches, youth groups, scout troops, athletic teams and other community groups about Kenya’s need for clean drinking water as well as established a crowdfunding website to collect donations online. Donations funded two LifeStraw Community water purifiers and a filter for Mukangu Primary School, which serves 380 students, and Kirby Academy, which serves 350 students, in western Kenya.

“This effort has changed the lives of many of our students in that they think differently about struggles,” Monarch Academy teacher Tanya Campbell said. “What they perceived as hard and challenging is not in comparison to the struggles of other students their age in other countries. Our sixth-graders have become aware of the world around them and feel confident in taking on world issues as they now know they too can make a difference.”

Monarch Academy will keep in touch with Mukangu Primary School and Kirby Academy to continue the project with next year’s sixth-grade class, Campbell said, with the goal of providing safe drinking water to additional schools in the future.

Monarch Academy Glen Burnie, a public charter school affiliated with TranZed Alliance, serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade with an enriched, rigorous, hands-on, academic curriculum emphasizing project-based learning and the arts and technology. In addition, Monarch Academy follows Transformation Education, an organizational philosophy that infuses a school’s beliefs and values into the look of the school building, instructional approach, teachers’ mindset and behavior and operating systems. (www.monarchacademy.org)