For the last decade, staffers at Desert Pines High School in Las Vegas have helped fulfill holiday wishes for students.
“We have a lot of kids who are in the foster system, we have a lot of kids who are living in poverty,” Cheri Guy, an English teacher at the school, tells TODAY.com. “These kids are facing enormous stress outside of the classroom.”
So each year, the school runs a program called “Wishmas," as first reported by broadcaster KSNV: Students write down a gift they would like to open on Christmas morning. They are also encouraged to share why it’s important to them. The faculty and community then work together to grant those wishes. This season, the initiative went viral, thanks in part to Guy.
Guy shared an emotional video on TikTok about the Wishmas program in November. In the clip, Guy wiped away tears as she read some of the requests from the nearly 3,000 students, which included a bag of Taki chips, “so I won’t feel hungry,” and slippers “to protect me from the cold.”
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Guy, who was sobbing at that point, encouraged viewers to message her or comment if they were interested in helping grant wishes.
“Maybe spread this around,” she said. “Maybe we could do something to try to make some of these things happen. Because there’s no way — even if all the teachers, if we all picked one student, we couldn’t cover everything. There’s so many students and they don’t want a lot.”
The internet did its thing and packages began pouring in from people across the country, bringing Guy to tears once again.
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“We have well over 300 wishes granted, which is amazing,” Guy tells TODAY.com. She says that 950 students are participating in the Wishmas program this year, and all gifts must be distributed before Dec. 15.
“A few of the seniors are asking for a yearbook because they can’t afford it. I’m looking at the spreadsheet right now and one kid asked for help paying for their cap and gown for graduation,” Guy says. “We have a student who asked for a textbook called ‘Lectures on Physics’ because he wants to be an astrophysicist.”
Guy reads a few more off of her spreadsheet:
- “I would like to give my mom a gift. She likes to shop at Walmart.”
- “Asking for a pair of headphones is important to me because my younger brother has been asking for them and I can’t afford them.”
- “I would like a Wingstop gift card. It will give me free food for the day.”
Guy teaches in a program called Jaguar Academy within Desert Pines High School. The students in Jaguar Academy are considered at risk of not meeting academic or social expectations. Guys says some of her kids are "on probation for one tiny mistake."
“One of the most incredible things about Wishmas is these kids are realizing that they are loved — and not just by the staff at school, but by strangers around the country (who) care about them and believe in them,” she says.
There’s a sign hanging in Guy’s classroom that says “One Person Can Change a World.”
“It used to say, ‘One person can change the world,’ but I changed it to ‘a world,’ because it’s not about changing the whole world. That’s what overwhelms us,” she says. “But if you can just think about, ‘What can I do for one person?’ That’s changing a world — and if we could all do that? Just imagine what our society would turn into.”
This article first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
