School supplies needed
By: Lea Kahn – Staff Writer
The first day of school means new shoes, new pants, a new shirt, a new dress and a backpack full of notebooks, pens and pencils, erasers and crayons – unless you are one of the hundreds of children whose parents are clients of HomeFront.
But Connie Mercer, executive director of HomeFront, and her staff are determined to see that those children have new clothing and accessories when school opens in September.
HomeFront, the Lawrence-based nonprofit group that helps the homeless and the working poor, is seeking "adoptive" parents or sponsors to supply back-to-school items for the children in those families, said Anita Hanft, the director of Mission Advancement.
But with one week before the Aug. 20 deadline to fill those backpacks, HomeFront still needs sponsors for 150 of the 980 children who are on the list, Ms. Hanft said. The plan is to distribute the backpacks to the children – ages 3 to 18 – during the last week in August, she said.
Signing up to sponsor a child is as simple as calling Stephanie Bilat, who is coordinating the back-to-school drive at HomeFront. Ms. Bilat has a list of children who need sponsors, as well as a list of items needed for each child.
"Besides a backpack, the children need a new outfit so they can look cool like everybody else on the first day of school," Ms. Hanft said. "There won’t be the instant stigma when they walk in the door. Starting back to school is serious business."
Through a sponsor’s gift of a new outfit and school supplies, the message to the child is that "there is someone who believes in you and that you will do well," she said, adding that "it’s a serious investment in a child." "It means so much to a child or a teenager that someone is thinking about you," she said.
Adoptive parents or sponsors are assigned a child for whom to shop. They are given the child’s name, age and sex. The list of children is compiled by HomeFront’s caseworkers, who are working with the families that enrolled in one of the myriad of programs offered by the organization.
A typical shopping list consists of a new pair of shoes or sneakers, a pair of new pants and a new shirt for boys, a dress or skirt and new blouse for girls. If a child is attending a school that requires a uniform, the names of the stores where it may be purchased will be provided to the sponsor.
Backpacks contain age-appropriate school supplies – notebooks, pens and pencils, erasers, a protractor, a ruler, crayons, markers, a lunchbox, scissors and glue. Younger children likely won’t need a protractor, for example, but they would appreciate crayons.
This year marks the 18th year that HomeFront has sponsored a back-to-school drive. The idea for the annual drive occurred to Ms. Mercer as she watched the homeless children board a school bus at the Sleepy Hollow Motel on Brunswick Pike, which housed homeless families.
Although those children lived in a motel, they still had to go to school, Ms. Hanft said. Ms. Mercer tried to "normalize" the children’s lives through the back-to-school drive, "because when you live in one room, it’s hard to get the wherewithal to get dressed to go to school," she added.
"I think people still do care," Ms. Hanft said. "But this year, with the economy like it is, life has become very complicated and people forgot or put off (the back-to-school drive). It’s not an extra trip to the store, and it would mean the world to these children."
For more information on the back-to-school drive or to sponsor a child, contact Ms. Bilat and HomeFront at 609-989-9417. HomeFront’s website is www.homefrontnj.org.

