French teacher, Margaret Leach, broke from her routine and went to bed without watching the national news. When she got to school the next day, she found out a civilization had been destroyed, and a friend’s life had been torn apart.

On January 12, the island of Haiti suffered destruction caused by a 7.0 earthquake. Ms. Leach’s good friend and former student teacher, Don Fougere, lost family in the devastation, prompting Ms. Leach to organize a donation throughout the school and have her students put up posters.

“It feels good to do something when you feel hopeless,” Ms. Leach said. “Even it was just making posters.”

According to Ms. Leach Mr. Fougere, a Haitian native, lived in New Orleans prior to Texas and endured the affects of Hurricane Katrina. When he finished his student teaching, he received a job in Keller, which he started just after the deaths of family members in Haiti.

“I was glad to have a student teacher from Haiti, so people know there’s not only Paris,” Ms. Leach said. “We became very good friends.”

When Ms. Leach got to class, her students immediately started talking about fundraising and even going to Haiti to help. They decided a donation with no particular goal would be the best way to raise money.

“We didn’t want to make a game out of it,” Ms. Leach said, “it didn’t seem appropriate.”

While organizing the donation, the students decided they would raise money for Haiti as a whole and the teachers could donate to Mr. Fougere, since many knew him from his job as a student teacher. The AVID students are currently researching which organization the donation will go to and the student council and Teen II students will accept donations at the garage sale on Saturday.

“I felt really bad for all those people because they lost everything that they ever had,” junior Lauren Smith said. “When we found out a lot of Mr. Fougere family was missing we wanted to help even more.”

When Ms. Leach met Mr. Fougere last year, she had always dreamed of adopting a school from West Africa, but when her student teacher talked about Haiti she changed her mind. When she decides which school they will adopt, she hopes to make it a tradition throughout the French classes.

“I think it’s really cool that we can help kids that don’t have an education like we do,” Smith said. “So often we take for granted the school that we have and what we have. Even if we make a small difference, it’s still a difference.”