ALPHA BETA FOUNDATION

Dear Alpha Beta Chapter

 

My name is Kelly Samantha Buono and I am a second-year Special Education Teacher at the Police Officer Rocco Laurie School IS 72.  I teach 7th grade ICT with my amazing co-teacher Ms. Baione.  I want to thank the members of Delta Kappa Gamma’s Alpha Beta chapter for choosing me to be one of the recipients for the Fund-a-Teacher initiative.  Thank you so much for helping me supply my students with the basic supplies they need to be successful and engaged at school.  

 

Working in a Title I school can be very challenging. Many of my students come from low-income families and cannot purchase the basic supplies that students need to be prepared every day in school to learn.  Thanks to the Fund-a-Teacher initiative, I was able to spend the stipend on buying class supplies of essential items important for my students to be prosperous in school. With the stipend, I was able to buy my students folders, pencils, pens, notebooks, loose-leaf and construction paper.  My students were so appreciative for my actions and they were amazed that they had a teacher so organized and generous to give them the items they need every day for school. They never had that before.  It felt very good to make them happy and assist their learning effectively. 

 

Also, using the rest of the stipend combined with my TeacherS Choice money (provided by the DOE), I was able to acquire a brand-new class set of dictionaries! We use dictionaries each Friday during our “library skills” class.  Every week we have a “Word of the Week”.  For our WOW task, students are responsible to use a dictionary to find the definition of the word, the part of speech, a synonym, and antonym and make up a sentence using the word.  The dictionaries are brand new and beautiful! There is both a dictionary and a thesaurus within the books.  The book is organized in a way that is very helpful for the students to find the definitions of words along with the thesaurus.  My students were so excited to use the new dictionaries and were so appreciative of the gesture.  The original dictionaries that we were using were very worn out with many rips and pages that were torn out.  These brand-new dictionaries really make a huge difference in my students learning.

 

Thank you so much again for inviting me here tonight and for choosing me to receive this generous stipend.  As we are or all once were teachers here, we know how expensive our jobs can be.  The endless class supplies eventually add up, along with the other items needed to enrich our students learning.  This stipend truly helped lighten that load for me and I am very grateful for that. 

 

Thank you so much to everyone involved again!

 

Kelly Samantha Buono

IS 72

Police Officer Rocco Laurie School

Staten Island, NY