Southern Schools Walk in Solidarity with Ocean Academy

Teachers and students in Southern Belize and banding together for the victims of the tragic road traffic accident that struck the members of the Ocean Academy boys’ basketball team. Earlier today, three schools hosted a walkathon and dollar drive to raise funds for the boy’s recovery, but it was also a signal of solidarity and hope. We spoke with schools that organized the event to hear how they are teaching their students to be allies and champions to their peers. Here’s more on that.

 

Sharon Valentine-Castillo, Vice Principal, Delille Academy

“Today’s activity, the Walkathon, was in collaboration with Ecumenical High School. As we partake in raising necessary funds in support of our brothers and sisters, our colleague, teacher colleague from Ocean Academy in Caye Caulker.  The whole idea is to show our support.  And to let them know we’re in this together. And so we have our students buy into the walkathon. And so it was smoothly run. Today it was well executed. And at the end of the day, whatever proceeds were collected from the Walkathon will be forwarded to our brothers and sisters and future colleagues in Ocean Academy.”

 

Anna Brackett, Vice Principal, Ecumenical High School

“ We were first thinking about just collecting funds overall with within our school because we have a large population. So we were thinking about just asking for monetary donations from the students, whatever it is that they can afford. But then we came up with the idea that you know what, let’s do something bigger. Let’s do something that we can show awareness And we decided that we would do a walkathon. So we didn’t want it to be only from Ecumenical. So we mentioned that we were going to invite the other schools once they were available and thankfully they both decided to join us. If we had more planning, we would have gone, all the way down south, IHS, Georgetown Tech, Julian Sho, but it was just a spur of the moment and we wanted to do more than just collecting, like Miss Gongora said our students need to know that life is bigger than them. And one of these days, we don’t know when it’s our turn or when we’ll ever be in that situation.”

 

Victoria Gongora, Principal, ANRI

“For us it was very successful. We saw it as a means of helping the students to develop empathy understanding and ensuring awareness, not just for traffic victims, but just to develop care for our fellow human beings, our fellow students across the country.”