We only read of fairy godmothers in Disney fairy tales. In Cinderella, her fairy godmother helped her turn a pumpkin into a horse and carriage and her dusty house dress into a beautiful ball gown. For Danielle White and Torrey Dale, two teachers at J.Z. George, an anonymous donor, who has never been to North Carrollton and has no ties to the school, funded White’s project and one of Dale’s projects on DonorsChoose.org.
Dale, a physical education coach, and White, a special education teacher at J.Z. George High School, were awarded their projects after reaching out to the community through the website for donations, donorschoose.org
White and Dale said the two have worked through the site to secure items for their classrooms when they worked in other school districts.
“We’d known about Donors Choose,” White said. “I came from Grenada, and I used it to get things for my classroom when I worked there.”
“I’m also familiar with Donors Choose, and I’ve used it before when I was in a bigger district,” Dale said.
White said she began her project, Feeding the Jaguars, after speaking to Cynthia Newman, another special education teacher and president of the booster club.
“She was having a hard time getting paper plates, forks, napkins, Gatorade, and week after week I would watch her stress out over this. I’d asked how was going to get funding for it, she said ‘I don’t know, the parents will donate it.’”
White said the booster club turned to its parents each week to provide a meal for the football team. Problem is, most of the parents are low income and have more than one child. She said to take the burden off of the parents, she decided to set up a project on Donors Choose.
She said she also brought in head coach Ben Burton to help her write the project. “He wrote the part about my students,” she said.
White, a new teacher to J.Z. George, said she doesn’t know the players yet and spoke with Burton to help write about the needs of his students.
“I brought him in because they’re not mine yet,” she said. “I don’t know them, but he does.”
She said after the project went live, she’d garnered a few donations until her anonymous donor found her project and funded the entire thing.
Not only did she fund it, she reached out to White and asked her if she needed anything else.
“I got a call from the administration that said ‘Mrs. White, you have a caller.’ I’m thinking, ‘Who’s calling me while I’m at work?’”
Turns out, it was the donor who lives in California.
“She told me that she something made her stop and call me,” she said. After speaking with her, the donor asked her what else she needed. That’s when she told her of Dale’s project.
In Dale’s first project, he requested basketballs, orange cones for drills and dribble goggles to use for fundamental basketball techniques.
After telling the donor about Dale’s project, she decided to fully fund his project also. Not only that, she purchased 70 meals from Kozy Kitchen, sent a $200 eGift card and is treating the team to the Crystal Grill in Greenwood.
Dale and White said the businesses in North Carrollton and Carrollton both donate to the team and the school as a whole, but there’s only so much they can do.
For the donor to sponsor the team’s meal is a sigh of relief for those in the booster club and the coaching staff.
White said she’d purchased items to make sandwiches for the Junior Varsity team and the numbers starting to add up.
“I spent like $100 on sandwich stuff for them,” she said. “Those things can add up.” She said she believes her donor initially wanted to donate because she spoke from her heart.
“Sometimes, you just gotta tell the truth,” she said. “When we were eating, I was trying to get them to understand that this is something that she didn’t have to do for them. She did it anyway.”
“She’s like our guardian angel. I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to be able to send her some team gear,” Dale said.
“Some of them have never been to a nice restaurant,” she said.
White said that since the donor contacted her, the two have become friends and communicate with each other frequently.
“She loves when I send her pictures,” she said.
White said that she believes that athletics helps to keep the kids motivated and to keep them from dropping out of school.
Dale’s second project is a film room and pregame lounge for the Jaguar and Lady Jaguar basketball teams.
“We serve Coila, Black Hawk, Teoc, Vaiden and McCarley,and some of my students don’t have transportation to leave campus and come back,” he said. So, as a way for entertainment and to keep his players out of trouble, he wants to create a film room and pregame lounge.
Athletic Director and Assistant Principal Alex Rawls and Burton want to do the same thing for the football team.
“We have to watch film in Coach Burton’s room,” he said. “So, we have to get dressed and walk back across the street to his classroom.”
And, as you can imagine, it’s cramped. Burton’s classroom holds 25 students, the football team has 50.
“We have guys standing up,” Rawls said. He said if they were able to have a film room they could keep their students across the street in the field house.
“This school is a sleeping giant,” Rawls said. “We have some of the nicest facilities for a school our size. It’s all about the kids, if we can bring in anything to help them and make them better then I’m all for it.”
