I want to tell you about the kind of guy, Terrence Walker, the guy running for Assembly in VA’s HD 81, is. Now, if you remember this is the guy who joined the PTA, before his kid was even old enough to go to public school. He and his wife, Tracy, wanted to be involved, hands on, and help where they could.
One of the things they noticed early on was that in certain parts of the county, kids weren’t doing as well in school as other parts. Probably because of a lot of factors but one was certainly a lack of technology. No access to computers or broadband. (A lot of the broadband issues were helped by COVID and virtual school, they had to have broadband then.)
Terrence’s son was going to a day care that worked with public schools providing before and after care. His son would be going to public school in a year or two. The day care didn’t have computers and a lot of folks with kids in the day care didn’t have computers in their homes either.
I can tell you that teaching kindergarten is hard. Twenty-five children show up on the first day of school with a vast variety of skills or lack thereof. Terrence thought that getting kids used to working with computers so they would be exposed to technology before going to public school would help close the gap in technology.
He talked about it. A lot. One day a friend of a friend of a friend of Terrence's mother mentioned that a community college in MD had outdated computers and was getting new ones. She asked Terrence if he’d be interested. Yes, yes, he was very interested in them. Before long, he had over 200 outdated computers scattered around his house.
Tracy Walker researched what it would take to make the computers run and found a software company that would sell them what was necessary to bring them up to speed. They roped in a few friends with mad computer skills and updated the computers enough for young children to use. Then they gave the updated computers out to day care centers who needed them. They also gave them out to families with no computers.
Now, granted Terrence is a special kind of guy with a deep seeded drive to help others. We could all do that though. I live in a city with 4 major colleges, and I don’t know how many community colleges. I have friends with friends with friends. And while I know nothing about computers, I have friends that do.
This kind of generosity might not come natural to me, but I’ll take Terrence Walkers example and follow it! If this is the way Terrence helps people when it’s not even his job, imagine what he’ll be able to do when it is his job? Let’s help him get elected.
Virginia has very lax rules about donating to candidates so anyone in the US could donate a million to his campaign. And that would be lovely, feel free! But there is another thing that counts big in our crazy world of politics. That’s tons of small dollar donors from all over, so don’t think your $2 donation doesn’t count. It counts big time!
