Brookside kids share their soles

CINDI GORTNER/Special to The Acorn WALK A MILE- The Brookside Elementary student council delivers 600 pairs of shoes donated by students' families to Share Your Soles. The nonprofit provides shoes to those in need worldwide. The Brookside students traveled to a Santa Barbara shoe store last week, the closest shoe drop-off point. Students at Brookside Elementary School in Oak Park learned last month how a simple pair of shoes can make a huge difference in a child's life.

The school's student council, an elected group of 18 fourth- and fifthgraders, wanted to do a community service project to help other kids. Through their teacher advisers, Mary Jane Weaver and Paula Stromquist, the students learned that there are children throughout the world who cannot go to school because they don't own shoes and that some of them cover the bottom of their feet with sticky black tar to protect them from gravel roads and hot pavement.

"All we had to do is say that some kids have to coat their feet in tar and our kids were all over it," said Weaver, a fifth-grade teacher. "This community was amazing. They brought brandnew shoes, from infant to adult sizes."

Student council members invited the entire student body to donate new and gently-used shoes. They hoped to collect 500 pairs and ended up with 600, said Stromquist, a fourth-grade teacher.

"The kids were magnificent and felt so proud of what they have contributed," Stromquist said.

After the collection ended, the student council sorted and boxed the shoes, preparing them for donation.

On May 29, the council loaded 26 boxes into their parents' cars and took them to the Santa Barbara Running Company, a store that serves as a drop-off point for donated footwear. From there, Share Your Soles, an Illinois-based nonprofit, collects and distributes the shoes.

Parents, teachers and Oak Park Assistant Superintendent Cliff Moore accompanied the group.

"It felt good giving shoes to people who don't have any," said Sarah Sigel, a fourth-grader who worked on the collection with her twin sister, Sophie.

"Now these kids can go to school," said Max Davis, a fourthgrade student who serves on student council with his twin, Jake.

Share Your Soles was established in 1999 by an Illinois woman after she traveled through Central America and saw children painting tar on their bare feet.

She later learned that often the children's feet become infected and have to be amputated. Hundreds of thousands of shoes have been donated and provided to indigent people in Central America, Southeast Asia, India, the Caribbean, Africa and Eastern Europe, as well as, in the United States, Appalachia, several Indian reservations, homeless shelters in Chicago and hurricane-affected areas in New Orleans.

For more information, visit www.shareyoursoles.org.