Thursday, Eh K Pru Shee Wah, a gifted 13-year-old refugee child from Myanmar, will soon go to the Albany Academy for a “shadow  day,” during which she will follow another student around for a day and figure out of this is where she wants to go to school for the next four years.

Except for the parent’s statement, her application to the Academy is finished (thank you Kathy Saso, the middle-school teacher who is working so hard to help her) and will be sent shortly to the school.

We are still awaiting her acceptance to the school, and also the financial details of her scholarship, should she decide to go, and the school admit her.

Eh K Pru is the first student in a new program I am working on to create to admit gifted refugee students to private schools in the Albany area.  The Albany Academy was the first school to respond to my queries. No refugee organization in th area was interested in helping, or would even speak to me about it.

So I decided to break out on my own.

I think it’s better that way, less red tape and politics.

I am also working together with a senior at the Academy named Alex Boggess, a gifted photographer whose senior project is raising money to help refugee children gain access to the best available education.

Once we know precisely what the school will offer, if it gets that far – I think it will be approximately $21,000 for four years – we will figure out what we need and work together to raise the difference. There could also be a school donation or gofundme page, we are considering all of our options.

I’ve contacted several other private schools – and spoken with many teachers – and they are interested in pursuing this idea.

The school would like us to help raise the shortfall for four years in advance, if possible, so that Eh K Pru’s tuition  security up to college will be guaranteed. There are several potential donors in the school family that will help,  and Alex and I will use our blogs to raise whatever money we can.

Any contributions or donations would go to the school directly, not to me.

I am very optimistic that this can and will happen. I hope some donors in the school community will step up also.

This is all still being negotiated, and I am pushing hard for the school to commit as much money as possible. They seem very sincere to me about making their school more diverse and rewarding a gifted student like Eh K Pru, who is a very impressive young woman.

This could have an enormous impact on Eh K Pru’s life, and it is very much in the direction I would like to move in order to keep up my support for the refugees in a practical and focused away. I want to make the money we raise count in a visible and measurable way.

Kathy Sosa, Eh K Pru’s very wonderful and dedicated teacher, is an inspiration. She is already talking about some of her other refugee students who are worthy of a program like this and would benefit from it.

I am very excited about this idea.

Eh K Pru is an amazing person. Teacher Kathy Saso says she would thrive in a private school environment.

She spent 10 years in a U.N. refugee camp and has only been in the United States for several years. She is remarkably poised, well spoken, a class leader and an honors student at the Hackett Middle School in Albany.

I hope she likes the school and I am fairly certain they will like her. I hope she is the first of a number of gifted refugee students. So I will keep everyone posted, there is no fund-raising at the moment, I think Alex and I can work well together, he has been raising money for this idea all year.

So stay tuned. I believe this is something I am called to do, and I think the Army Of Good will feel the same  way.