Great backpack giveaway
200 Tenderloin children get new duds, knapsack as back-to-school gift
Nine-year-old Jethron Revilla knows what it’s like to show up on the first day of school in a windbreaker that doesn’t fit anymore.
“You feel like an orange with all the juice squeezed out,” he said. “That’s what small clothes feel like. Too tight. Not for you anymore. Not good.”
Jethron was browsing the racks Friday at the St. Anthony Foundation in San Francisco, one of 200 children invited to get ready for the coming school year by picking out new clothes and taking them all home in a new backpack. He got a gray windbreaker, two sweaters, T-shirts and some underwear.
Just because they were free did not mean Jethron did not choose carefully. He rejected T-shirts emblazoned with such stuff as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an Iowa auto parts store. Thirdgraders can be tough on classmates who show up with the wrong logos. Being among the first of the kids to go through the shirt rack, Jethron was in a position to be picky.
He did get a bunch of underwear emblazoned with the Beverly Hills Polo Club, a place that St. Anthony’s clients rarely frequent.
Nobody was likely to glimpse that logo besides his mom, Mirasol Revilla, who said the family was grateful to St. Anthony’s for getting the school year off to a promising start.
“We don’t have money,” said Revilla, who lives with her son in the Tenderloin. “If it wasn’t for St. Anthony’s, the first day of school was going to be a problem.”
Helping those on the outs, said Executive Director Barry Stenger, is what St. Anthony’s has been doing for 65 years.
“The first day of school can be traumatic for a kid,” he said. “We want to make sure all our clients are respected. I don’t want to say that clothes make the person, but certainly they can get in the way.”
Poor people, said Stenger, are not the problem. Poverty is the problem.
Passing out the girls underwear was Raquel Magano, who was in charge of telling moms that the limit was two pairs per child. Magano, from San Ramon, has been a volunteer for about a year, ever since her daughter, Joanne, started helping out as part of a school project. Magano figured she might as well pitch in, too.
“We’d always come to San Francisco for fun, and I’d always see poor people on the sidewalk when I was having an expensive dinner in a restaurant,” she said. “I said to myself, what the heck, might as well make yourself useful. Helping people makes you see things different.”
Eric De Castro, 7, picked out a jacket and shirts for himself and an orange vest for his sister. Worn-out clothes, he said, feel bad.
“They itch,” he said. “They’re too tight. When they don’t feel good, you don’t feel good.”
He put his stuff into his new backpack full of supplies. Inside were boxes of crayons and color pencils. Their points were sharp, the way crayons and color pencils are every August.
Each backpack also had a few kid books. Not every backpack had a copy from the wildly popular Captain Underpants series, but some did, and there was a little swapping going on among the clientele. The adventures of Marshmallow Bunny stood little chance against the captain.
According to the San Francisco Unified School District, about 2,400 of its students are homeless and many of them are St. Anthony clients. The foundation also serves 2,600 meals a day in its remodeled dining room on Golden Gate Avenue. On Friday, the menu included turkey and beans.
“In a time when tensions are running high between haves and have-nots,” said Stenger, “we are committed to taking care of each other.”
“You feel like an orange with all the juice squeezed out. That’s what small clothes feel like. Too tight. Not for you anymore. Not good.” Jethron Revilla, 9, Tenderloin resident