One Reed Teacher Shares A Giving Experience With Her Students

By Eliza Hallabeck

As Reed Intermediate School fifth grade teacher Karen King told a group of Girl Scouts from Troop 820 on Saturday, January 30, she keeps notebooks, markers, books, and more in her car.

The reason, she said while taking a number of the Girl Scouts for a tour of the Dorothy Day House in Danbury, is because she sometimes waits on children as a waitress at the hospitality house during her shifts there.

When that happens, Ms King explained, she runs out to her car and comes back with something as a gift for the child or young adult.

“There are all different types of people who come here,” Ms King said. “They are old and they are young, and we miss them sometimes when they are gone.”

“They have their challenges,” said Ms King to the Girl Scouts, “and they have their gifts. And one of their challenges is not having a place to stay.”

Other than food, the Dorothy Day House also provides shelter for a limited number of people each night in a back building on the premises. People who use the hospitality house for shelter are limited to using it for two weeks at a time only.

“I like to bring kids,” Ms King said to the troop, “because it is something they will remember for the rest of their lives.”

Ms King said that she has been volunteering with the Dorothy Day House since before she began her teaching career.

“It’s the only classic soup kitchen in the area, that’s what we call it,” said Ms King. “It’s the only place that really offers a free meal every single day to over 100 people in the greater Danbury area.”

It is available to everyone in the area, she said, so if someone in Newtown needed food, they could go to the Dorothy Day House.

“There are volunteers that show up in the morning to make breakfast,” she said. “Around noon another group comes in, these are all volunteers, and they make a hot meal for the evening. They also set the tables, get organized, clean and make 120 to 125 bag lunches. The bag lunches are so that when people leave after the meal, they can bring something home for them. Most of the guests that come here are very poor,” said Ms King.

From 3:15 to roughly 5:30 guests are invited in for the dinner. Ms King signed up to be a waitress during dinner, because, as a teacher, that was when she was available to volunteer.

As scouts helped make 100 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for visitors to the Dorothy Day House on Saturday, other scouts were working on making breadbaskets to be put out with dinner.

Caraluzzi’s, Stop & Shop, and Stew Leonard’s, according to Ms King, provided food for the day. While the holidays are a big time of the year for food donations, Ms King said around this time of the year donations begin to run low.

Despite that, “This is a remarkable place. It seems to be blessed,” said Ms King. “There seem to be many little angels that take care of everything.”

She was standing in the basement of the Dorothy Day House and pointing out the organized shelves of goods assembled to keep the hospitality house running.

“It just manages,” Ms King said. “I don’t know how it does, but it does.”

The group of Girl Scouts was one of many groups Ms King brings with her for some of her shifts at the hospitality house, which, she said, serves up to 140 people dinner each night.

“At Dorothy Day, every single day a different volunteer group runs the place, which is remarkable if you think about it,” she said.

When she volunteers there on Mondays after school, she has no idea who will be there to run the house on Tuesday.

She originally became a volunteer with the Danbury Congregational Church, because that was her church at the time. Now she volunteers with what she called a rogue group of volunteers on Monday. Another volunteer group, Newtown Rotary Club, runs the Dorothy Day House every fifth Saturday.

Newtown Rotarian and Dorothy Day House committee member Jim Gulalo said it is important to get younger students involved, and, he added, Ms King is working above and beyond the education of the students she brings.

“It is an important opportunity,” said Mr Gulalo, “that they probably would not get if it wasn’t for her.”

How It Began

Ms King said the house is run completely by private donations, and a landlord leases the facility. About six or seven years ago, she started telling her classes about her time volunteering at the house.

“When I would talk about it, the kids really wanted to come,” she said, “and they wanted to know more about it. They wanted to do it too. So I contacted some of the groups that serve on Saturdays.”

She approached Newtown Rotary Club with her proposal and the club allowed Ms King to bring students.

“That is how it started,” said Ms King. Eventually, she also started bringing students with her on Mondays, when there would be a day off from school. The last time this happened was on the past Martin Luther King Jr Day.

“The kids are not old enough at this age, fifth and sixth grade, to serve a meal,” Ms King said, “but they are old enough to come in at noon and help to prepare the meal. That is exactly what they do. They come in about noon.”

She has learned to limit the number of students she brings to about ten, because it helps to give the group a positive experience.

“Whether it is my group on Mondays, or Saturdays with the Rotarians, I get there a little bit early, and I set up stations around the place,” she said. “Usually there are adults in the kitchen cooking, but we will be in charge of setting the tables, making the bag lunches, setting out silverware, and cleaning.”

She said she always ends the volunteering effort by bringing the groups of students on a tour of the facility.

“Most people never get to see what a shelter looks like,” said Ms King. “The kids get to go see a shelter, they get to see the basement where we store the food, so that they know where the food we are always collecting for the hungry goes.”

Since she has been doing the volunteering efforts with her students, other youth organizations, like the Girl Scout troop on Saturday, now contact her through her old students to help at the Dorothy Day House.

Students Return To Help

Students who have volunteered at the Dorothy Day House to help with Ms King sometimes return years later when they are old enough to volunteer on their own, Ms King said.

Newtown High School ninth grader Ally Hotchkiss said she was a student of Ms King’s when she first learned about the Dorothy Day House.

“She always talked about how rewarding it is to help other people,” said Ally. “I wanted to help feed them, help to brighten their day.”

When she was one of Ms King’s students, Ally was too young to help wait on visitors, but this past September Ally started waiting there after she became old enough.

One of Ms King’s current students, Kelly Daly said she learned about the opportunity to help at the Dorothy Day House after Ms King explained it in school.

“I have learned that these people have it really tough,” said Ally, “and we have it really good. We should appreciate things in life.”

Kelly said she has gone with Ms King to help make sandwiches twice.

From her years of experience with the Dorothy Day House, Ms King said one story that sticks out in her memory was from a few years ago.

“A lot of people who come there are immigrants from countries that have spicier foods,” said Ms King. “So no matter what we are serving, it could be absolutely anything, people want hot sauce.”

About five years ago, the money to purchase hot sauce and other extras had been running low. Volunteers, like Ms King, started purchasing hot sauce and other items to bring in with their own money. One day, she said, she was serving a man, and he asked for hot sauce. When she went to look for hot sauce, he overheard the volunteers had been purchasing it with their own money.

When she went back to the table, “He took out his wallet, he had $8 in his wallet, and he gave me $5. He gave me more than half his money. I know that sounds like a silly thing, but on a cold day, and no one has money, he wanted to contribute. I can’t explain it, but it had a big affect on me. I could see he didn’t have anything else. When you don’t have money, $8 is a lot.”

She returned to work the next day and told her students the story, and eventually Reed Intermediate Principal Donna Denniston heard the story from the students.

“A week later in comes Donna Denniston with this giant case of hot sauce from Costco,” she said. “Then the kids started bringing in hot sauce.”

Hot sauce still finds its way to her desk, and sometimes she does not know who it is from.