St. Mary Students Help the Homeless to Honor King

“Very few kids moan and groan about being in school today,” said Principal Gabriela Bala. “It’s a tradition that we are here on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.”

It’s almost a ritual for the school to stay open to honor the civil rights leader. Instead of the school’s 211 students being at home in their PJs, they were in their classrooms this morning doing service projects.

Bala, who has three children that attend the school, said she doesn’t remember the school ever closing for the federal holiday. She said today's focus for the kindergarten through eighth-grade classes is to celebrate what King stood for — and to honor his name by helping others.

Many of the classrooms concentrated their efforts on the warming center that is hosting this week through Jan. 28. The center is open to anyone who needs a warm meal or a place to sleep for the night.

Fourth-grade students donated food items and prepared 56 sandwiches for the warming center's guests, while the second-graders prepared 531 treat bags.

“One of the things we asked students to do back in October was donate some of their Halloween candy for this service project,” Bala said. “The students made this small sacrifice in order to help others.”

Other students made scarves, wrote letters, decorated lunch bags, read books and watched movies about King.

The kindergarten class even did a variation of the 1963 Freedom Walk where King led 125,000 people in Detroit. The children called their version a Peace Parade. Carrying musical instruments and signs that read "Be kind & caring" and "Be nice to everyone," the children chanted, “Pray for peace” as they marched in the hallways and through the classrooms.