Saints rookie delivers robots to KIPP

By Kaelin Maloid
Contributing Writer

When Kipp Leadership Academy fourth-to-sixth grade teacher Kirk Thomas told his students someone famous was coming to visit them, the answers ranged from August Alsina to the president of the United States. However, the person who walked through the door was New Orleans Saints rookie cornerback, Delvin Breaux.

Breaux showed up to Kipp Academy to deliver a prize Thomas had won to build an iPad-controlled robot through the Chevron Fuel Your School program. The partnership funds local schools and teachers across the world. Chevron Fuel Your School partnered with Donors Choose, and online charity matching teachers to donors, to help fund Thomas’s project.

“I didn’t tell them what happened, just that we had a big surprise coming up. So they were very surprised at what happened this morning, especially with the Saints player coming,” said Thomas.

The teacher put in a request for funding for his robot around September and said he was “very excited” to find out Chevron Corporation wanted to fund his project. This is not Thomas’s first go-round applying for funding. Thomas has received funding from Donors Choose before, however, this was the first time he had received funding through Chevron. Usually when he lobbies for funding for his projects, Thomas said, in the past, it takes a little while because donors would often chip in a “few dollars here” and a “few dollars there,” he said.

“But Chevron just stepped up the plate, and they foot the whole bill, and I was very excited about that,” said Thomas. “That means we could build our robot sooner rather than later, and I was very excited about that.”

Teachers go online to DonorsChoose.com and apply for grants in the month of September, and Chevron goes and chooses funds in early October. Being that they have a short window, they select a few programs they would like to highlight. This is the third year Chevron has done Fuel Your School in this area.

“This particular project is about robotics. The teacher requested a Lego Mindstorms Robot, and, I mean, what’s cooler than a robot? So when we saw it was about robots, we thought, okay, that would be a really good program to highlight,” said Chevron spokesperson, Leah Brown.

Before Breaux walked in, however, the students had to wait for their surprise guest and listen to Brown, Thomas, and principal, Herneshia Dukes, speak.

This article originally published in the March 7, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.