Thanksgiving

November 10, 2003

Dear Editor,

My third grade classroom is bursting with Thanksgiving. I like to think of the room walls as a cornucopia containing our truest bounty, children. Yet last winter our community did not know what this November would hold because the state budget reduced school funding by 13 million dollars.

Programs vital to our school district like reduced class size for third grade were at risk. The communities of Santa Monica and Malibu came together to address the budget crisis with grace and fortitude. Indeed this tenacity is a legacy from our country's long history with pilgrims who pioneered America with hope.

Perhaps my strongest memory from last year involves a tiny third grade girl. Walking by her father during the Pink Slip Parade, she worked to raise community awareness towards Measure S. When it passed, her father proudly told me that his daughter now understood the power of democracy.

I thank the City Councils of Santa Monica and Malibu for their generous
contribution towards our schools. I thank the entire community for helping Measure S to pass. Most of all I am thankful to work in a place where children do learn that they can make a difference. Not only are they our richest harvest, the way we all tend them will ripple eternity.

Sincerely,

Kitty Donohoe
Third Grade Teacher
Roosevelt Elementary School

November 10, 2003

Dear Editor,

One hundred forty years ago, Sarah Hale saved Thanksgiving. By the mid nineteenth century, the holiday was fading into history, celebrated only in New England, ignored in the rest of the country.

Sarah -- a mother of five, a poet, the first female magazine editor in the United States, publisher of Poe, Longfellow and Hawthorne -- dreamed of an entire nation celebrating a day of thanks together, like a family. So she began to write letters, and inspired the women of America to write letters as well. Thousands of letters. To President Taylor, then President Fillmore, President Pierce, President Buchanan.

They all refused the request. But Sarah and her army of volunteers kept writing, to the new President. And finally Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, celebrated for the first time on November 26, 1863 -- one week after the President delivered an Address dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg.

Now it's seven score years later. And this year, just as Sarah Hale and thousands of others came together to save Thanksgiving, this community came together to save something just as precious. Our schools. Our teachers. Our children. Our future. This year, we all share a beautiful new reason to give thanks.