A South Carolina high school principal has done more than the entire Republican Party has to help lessen some of the burdens Americans are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since August, North Charleston High School Principal Henry Darby has been working at a Walmart, stocking shelves between 10 PM and 7 AM a few times a week, while also being a principal. He’s been doing this in order to generate some money he can give to students dealing with serious financial hardships during the pandemic.
He told the Today Show that he began working the second job after hearing about students and their families sleeping under bridges, and a former student of his sleeping in a car with her daughter, so he decided to do something about it. He decided to pick up the extra hours to help some of these students with utility bills and other financial stresses they could not meet. Mr. Darby has quietly been working three nights a week for almost half the year. In the last few weeks his story has gotten out, as has more money donated by the many people inspired by this act of hard work and kindness.
Since then the Today Show partnered with Walmart to donate $50,000 to Darby’s cause, and a GoFundMe page set up to collect $20,000 for the cause has now collected over $132,000 in just a few days. Considering that just under 90% of the North Charleston student body lives at or below the poverty level, the money that this one man has been able to generate is just a drop in the bucket. But he is doing what he can because he’s a good guy and that’s what people do.
Darby has now done a couple of interviews for news outlets and has repeatedly explained he isn’t interested in the attention for himself. "The attention, I'm not used to it. I don't think that I've done anything worthy of distinction or to warrant the attention." Darby has done more than enough to earn the praise he is receiving, and his example is a reminder of the billionaires and the elected officials not even doing the bare minimum asked of them by our weakening social contract.
The Today story below gives a nice overview. Warning: The music gets rather schmaltzy at points.