Credit: Shawnie Loveless

WHS’s Connect Program ran its annual holiday gift drive to fulfill the wishlist of children enrolled in the Dorchester based non-profit daycare organization, the Yawkey Center. This drive brought the town together and impacted both the students in Connect, as well as the greater Wayland community. “You could see how helpful the town was and how our community came together and wanted to help out a community that wasn’t our own [and] kids who were less fortunate than we were,” senior and Connect Program member Jordynn Lee said.

The Connect Program hand delivered gifts to every child enrolled at the Yawkey Center, a non-profit daycare organization in Dorchester, on Thursday, Dec. 12. The event not only impacted the center, but also students and community members in Wayland who gained a deeper sense of perspective and empathy.

Before Thanksgiving, the Connect Program announced a toy drive to collect and prepare donations which included converting the language lab into a functioning workshop. As the delivery day approached, the students and teachers sorted and wrapped gifts while also creating cards for each child.

“This particular project within our Connect Program allows students to get out of the community and to see what other people’s experiences are like,” co-teacher of the Connect Program, Erin Lehmann said. “They’re also getting a sense that there’s a very real need in the world.”

The Connect Program is a class WHS offers to broaden students’ horizons and prioritize an alternative learning experience through drives, field trips and student-run experiences that promote curiosity and problem solving skills. It’s run by Lehmann, English teacher Edmund Dehoratius and Special Education teacher Jeffery Blue.

This year, the Connect class ran their second annual gift drive in order to collect toys and clothes for the children at the center. The center’s directors reach out to the children’s families and find out what’s on their wishlists to report these gifts back to the Connect Program.

“Once [Connect students] got the list of the wish list, they created a place for everyone in the community to send in these gifts,” Lehmann said. “Our students were responsible for finding all the gifts that were requested and then adding them to that account so that people in the community could shop for them.”

The class took a field trip to the Yawkey Center and delivered the gifts and cards to each child. Students also lent a hand at the center after giving the gifts, by playing with the children, handling infants and distributing supplies.

While this is the Connect Program’s second annual Yawkey Center gift drive, the center’s relationship with WHS is decades old. The connection between WHS and the Yawkey Center sprung from a French teacher who knew someone at the Yawkey Center. The gift drive was originally created and run by the World Language Department. As years went by, the drive became difficult for the language wing to keep running, so they offered the drive to the Connect class.

“Part of the mission of the Connect program is to connect our students with the wider community, and learn life skills in the process,” Lehmann said. “So when the language teacher said ‘this is actually something that would be perfect for the Connect program,’ we said yes.”

The Yawkey Center is a non-profit daycare organization affiliated with Catholic Charities in Boston that works to offer a pre-kindergarten program to anyone in the area, regardless of financial and housing situations.

Daycare centers can offer valuable services to working parents and people who can’t have eyes on their children at all times, but admission to the daycare system can be a selective and complicated process. In 2022, the average price of tuition for one infant and one four year old is $23,639, which is about a third of the mean U.S. income.

“Traditional daycare is so hard to get into,” Lehmann said. “It’s very expensive and cost prohibitive.”

The Yawkey Center works to change these odds by accommodating for all its community members financial situations, making their daycare center accessible to anyone in need. This includes children whose parents may be experiencing housing insecurity, children with learning disabilities and families that have come to the U.S. through the immigration system.

“They serve an underprivileged community, so if someone is from a family that’s struggling financially, and they can’t afford traditional daycare, they would go to the Yawkey Center,” Lehmann said.

WHS students use the opportunity of volunteering as a way to enrich themselves in seeing outside of the economic bubble of Wayland. Visiting and donating to the Yawkey Center showed some students the perspectives of different people’s lives.

“I learned that a lot of kids don’t get to have Christmas presents that people living in the suburbs are fortunate to get, and we take these for granted,” senior and Connect Program member Jordynn Lee said.

Some Connect students noticed the presents the children and their families wished for Christmas were different from items some Wayland residents might wish for. Families asked for practical items, some things they needed rather than just toys and games.

“It really made me realize that a lot of families can’t afford to get toys and stuff, so for Christmas, they needed to ask for items like a car seat,” senior and Connect Program member Mackenzie Regan said. “It felt really good to help give back.”

The toy drive with the Yawkey Center demonstrated the town’s ability to come together by having residents donating presents for the kids. The impact the community had on the project was essential for the drive to be successful.

“It goes far beyond our students and makes other people in this community think about how they can pay it forward and do good for people they may never meet,” Lehmann said.