Amadi is 18. Amaya is 13, and Amiyah is 9. All three of them attended Morgridge Academy. [Music] Amadi was outside on the playground playing, and he had an asthma attack and the nurse wasn't there. It scared me because I couldn't leave my job to get to him and just that one experience led me to bring them to Morgridge Academy.
[Music] Morgridge Academy at National Jewish Health is a k-8 school for chronically ill students. We're actually a freestanding school on the campus of a hospital so our students who need our care, they can have a more normal existence. If you come into our school, you probably wouldn't even know our kids were sick. They do the same curriculum as every other public school in Colorado. For kids with chronic illnesses, that's a big deal. If you're a young healthy person and you get COVID, you're probably going to have mild symptoms. For our kids, that's a lot different. If one of our little guys got sick, whether they're vaccinated or not, they're still at a much higher risk for complications and even death. The way we handled the pandemic and how we got through it, nobody skipped a beat. We are really like a community center for our students, and all their families’ homeschooling. It was very trying. Morgridge supplied us with the computers. On a weekly basis, we came and picked up food.
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. 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 health care 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 in 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. 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. At Morgridge Academy, our philosophy is to give students voice and choice within the classroom because they don't have a lot of voice and choice in their health. Bringing in the community lets both families and students feel in control of what they're learning and how they're feeling. Here one of the big things we give them is PE and recess every day so they get to have that movement that they may not get to have in another environment. We want the kid to have a good hold of their identity and be confident in themselves when they move into their new school and they're meeting new people. Amadi, when he made it to high school and his performance there showed me that Morgridge did do the job, he graduated high school with 38 college credits. I was excited
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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 Morgridge student so philanthropy is critically important to our school because two-thirds of our budget is coming from donors without Morgridge a lot of kids don't get to experience school and when you know that kids are missing school because of their sickness, how will they make it in life without learning?
[Music] My kids are able to attend school because of Morgridge, and I'm not scared to send them. I know that the nurses are going to be here to help them. I know that they have medication here in case of an emergency. I know the staff at mortgage is going to go above and beyond for my kids. I know. [Music]
