“It was such a nice way to end the last Friday of my holidays.”

Craig Macartney
Spur Ottawa Writer

CHRI Family Radio gave their annual back-to-school contest a twist this year. Rather than giving away a backpack of school supplies, they invited listeners to call in and nominate a teacher who made learning special, amid the challenges of COVID. As it turns out, the contest reached further than they expected.

“There are some heroes in our midst, despite the fear and uncertainty,” says Care Baldwin, the station’s Afternoon Drive host. “Because of how much teachers are going through, we wanted to give extra attention to them this year.

Baldwin says the station aims not only to bless their listeners, but also for listeners to realize that they are blessed to be a blessing. The back-to-school contest is one way they always do that, usually by giving contest winners two backpacks full of school supplies: one for the winner and another that the winner can give to a classmate. Through this year’s contest, they hoped to enable a listener to bring a gift basket full of prizes to their favourite teacher, but the winner decided to stretch it further.

“The contest winner is an educational assistant [named Anne-Marie] who has an incredible spirit and positive attitude,” Baldwin says. “She was bragging about the kindergarten teachers she works with, how they work really hard at virtual learning and doing what they needed to do last school year.”

“During virtual learning my kindergarten coworkers worked so hard to make learning fun and meaningful to the kids.”

At the end of the week, Anne-Marie’s name was drawn at random from the list of successful callers. Rather than bring the basket to one teacher, she distributed the prize among the kindergarten teachers at the French Catholic schools where she works.

“I mainly work in the kindergarten classrooms. During virtual learning my kindergarten coworkers worked so hard to make learning fun and meaningful to the kids,” Anne-Marie explains. “I wanted to do something special for them.”

Anne-Marie says when she found out she won, she was so surprised that she squealed. “It was such a nice way to end the last Friday of my holidays and each of the four kindergarten teachers were so happy to receive their gifts. They were very surprised and grateful. The hand sanitizer, masks, and wipes have been put to very good use so far.”

The basket included gifts from CHRI and donations from Giant Tiger, in Blossom Park. In addition to sanitizer and masks, it contained $300 of school supplies, coffee, a coffee mug, a lunch bag, a planner, a duffel bag, a weighted blanket, and candies. Anne-Marie says the blanket, especially, will be a Godsend to help calm down students with ADHD, autism, anxiety, or who have trouble managing their emotions.

“My coworkers are such bright lights. They have positive attitudes, they are kind, loving, creative, gentle, and beautiful people. They truly shine the light and love of Jesus to the students.”