You’ll find Colleen Stiles in the classroom at Orchard Elementary School, but she’s not the teacher.
She is the grandma.
“I love kids. That's why I do this,” Stiles says.
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She previously taught school and decided to volunteer for the Foster Grandparents program after her husband passed away. She’s been doing it for 16 years.
“I think this program is terrific because I think it helps three groups. It helps the kids, it helps the teachers, and it helps us seniors. It gives us something to think about other than ourselves,” she says.
Just down the hall, Mary Anderson is also busy helping students with their reading and writing.
Unlike Stiles, she had no previous experience in education.
“I’ve had friends and family that have said you should have been a teacher. I was like, no, that’s a whole different patience level,” she laughs. “I’m a pushover with the kids. It’s fun. I enjoy it.”
Stiles and Anderson are two of the 29 super seniors currently in the Foster Grandparents program.
The Foster Grandparent program is a national service program that is sponsored with matching funds through Intermountain Health.
Lisa Lamere is the program manager.
“It gets them out of the house, recognizing that they have amazing qualities that they can still add to the community. They become a solution for a problem, so it’s worked great for the last 54 years. It’s just an amazing program,” Lamere says.
The volunteers are paid a small stipend of four dollars an hour and expected to work at least 12 hours a week, but both Stiles and Anderson say there’s a much bigger reward that comes from working with kids.
“I get lots of hugs, and I will be in the grocery store and a kid will come up behind me and throw his arms around me and say Grandma, Grandma. And the mom will say, 'hey you don’t know her.' And they say, 'I do. She is my grandma,'” Stiles says with a smile.
“Just being there when they look at you and smile—just knowing that they got that attention from you. You know that individual attention,” says Anderson.
Individual attention that can make a big difference in a child’s life and also in a foster grandparent’s life.
“I encourage anybody to get involved in helping others just because you get as much out of it as those that you are helping,” Stiles says.
Click here to nominate someone for Q2’s Super Senior segment.
