When you think about kids in middle school who have attendance problems, it can be easy to blame the parents (or the kids themselves), shake your head, and throw up your hands at a problem that is too big to be fixable. But what if all some of these kids need are clean clothes to wear to school? Whirlpool has taken on what could be dismissed as a minor issue and seen tremendous results.
Last year Whirlpool created the Whirlpool Care Counts Program and donated seventeen pairs of washers and dryers to school districts in St. Louis and in Fairfield, California. The schools then invited kids with attendance problems to bring in their laundry to be cleaned while they were in class.
The results were astounding: over 90% of participating students increased their attendance that year, at-risk students attended almost two more weeks of school, and each student got approximately 50 loads of laundry done at school. This year, Whirlpool will expand the program to twenty more schools in five more districts.
My mom’s high school is able to keep so many homeless and struggling kids in school because they have showers and washing machines!
But middle/elementary schools just don’t have the same facilities.
If our middle school kids had locker room showers, laundry service, and TRANSPORTATION…dear god, I wanna cry just thinking about it!
Kids (especially girls) COULD ACTUALLY COME TO SCHOOL!
YASSSS FOR SERVING THE NEEDS OF MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS!!!!!
YES!!!!
Props to Whirlpool for doing good work. For all the asshattery people and companies do, I think it’‘s very important to applaud and make viral cases when they do something right \o/
