[Music] When COVID first hit it was about 150 on a scale of 100. These kids have chronic conditions and every single one of them has told me that they're scared of COVID because they don't know how it'll interact with the disease that they might have. When you think about a little guy who's had a double lung transplant, he cannot get COVID. Everybody was really afraid that one of our kids was going to die from this.
When the pandemic first hit, we had a lot of families who suddenly didn't have jobs or had greatly reduced hours and so it was not only an educational crisis, a social emotional crisis, a medical crisis, but it was also a financial crisis. Every week we delivered food to every single family we would drop off pantry items. Sometimes we dropped off fresh produce.
We've actually done a lot around grief with the kids because we don't have a family in our community who hasn't had a family member, or a good friend die of COVID. Working with a community that is mostly black and brown, underprivileged, underserved is going to be difficult and then you throw in the fact that a lot of them have chronic illnesses so we want to do as much as we can to set them up for success.
Morgridge Academy is a really special place. We live in an intersection between healthcare and education. We get to provide a full school experience for kids who otherwise would probably have to be homebound. Especially in a pandemic, it's really important for a kid who has a health condition to be able to be an environment where they feel like they're safe. Where they know if I do have an asthma attack, it's going to be okay and the nurses are going to take care of me.
Morgridge Academy provides that ring of safety so that the kids feel like they can learn better. We're really fortunate in that our classes are small and because of that we know our kids really well. Our kids can go on field trips in normal times, they get to go swimming, they do pe every day and we're able to make sure that they're doing it in a really safe way while letting them feel like normal kids. The ingenuity that I see every day in this building is astounding. If there are any questions about problem-based learning, it is a learning model in which here's a real-world problem here are some strategies how are you going to solve it. PBL allows students to develop a lot of the success skills that they wouldn't in a traditional classroom; thinking through authentic problems that exist in our community and then becoming problem solvers. To work through that problem and figuring out a solution we've talked with a lot of industry experts and they say these are the skills that they're looking for.
Everybody says kids are resilient and they're not wrong. Staff, students, and families have found strengths inside of ourselves that we never knew were there we will definitely come out of this stronger.
Philanthropy and donation to this school make it what it is today. For us and the high needs of our kids, it costs about three times more to educate a mortgage student, so philanthropy is critically important to our school because two-thirds of our budget is coming from donors. If we did not have that, there's no way we would have been able to do what we've done for our kids. Through all of this Morgridge Academy matters because we serve students that have chronic illnesses and without us a lot of times those students wouldn't attend school. We have some students that are constantly at the hospital in doctor's appointments and that's their whole life. We teach kids there's something outside of the hospital. We can take care of you medically and we can teach you community. We can teach you social skills. We can teach you academics. We can teach you how to be physical even though you have asthma, you can still run around or swim in the pool and without Morgridge Academy, a lot of these students wouldn't have the quality of life that they have
[Music]
