Thread: *THIS* is What the Christmas Spirit and Season is About

( yea i know its not about immigration, but its about the spirit of the season that we will celebrate next weekend )



Letters to radio station prompt special delivery of gifts for cancer-stricken Frisco teacher and family

05:00 PM CST on Friday, December 17, 2010
By JESSICA MEYERS / The Dallas Morning News
jmeyers@dallasnews.com

They wished for toy cars and IPod Touches. But mostly, they wished for her.

Students at Frisco's Gunstream Elementary School asked a local radio station to make Christmas memorable for their computer teacher, a single mother who struggles with cancer in her lungs, liver and colon. The station, which pairs wishers with donors during the holidays, received more than 380 letters for Julie Frame. A representative from radio station KLTY-FM (94.9) presented her Friday with thousands of dollars in insurance deductibles, a free trip with her teenage boys and months of rent payments. Others who read the students' wishes showed up to offer $3,000 in food coupons and gift certificates for her sons.

The school already has raised more than $4,000 for Friends of Julie Frame, a foundation employees started to help her pay for treatments. Teachers passed around tissue boxes and students whooped as Frame hobbled to the front of the cafeteria to accept the donations.

"I've never felt so much love as when I'm in these halls," she said between sobs. She held a plastic sucker between her lips that dispensed pain medication. Her clothes sagged on her body. "The worst day here is better than the best day at home," she said.

Every student at Gunstream attends her computer lessons. They've grown accustomed to the box she wears for her chemotherapy treatment, the days she must Skype class from the cancer center, the blanket she wraps around herself year round.

"Even though she feels sick every single day, she comes to school," wrote 10-year-old Madison McMakin in her Christmas wish letter to the radio station. "She lost feeling in her fingers so she can't type, she lost feeling in her legs so she can't be a soccer coach, she also can't walk for as long as she used to and she can't walk around the school and say hi."

Tamorah Diaz, a parent who spearheaded the letter campaign, said the students' response spoke most about Frame's influence. Like the teachers around her, she wore a red t-shirt that read, "Team Frame."

"This is a woman who has had to lay down in the field on the way to her sons' football games," she said, because she refuses to miss them. "She gives everything of herself to her own kids, to our kids."

She grabbed another tissue.

Frame shrank into her chair as the gifts continued. A corner of squirming kindergarteners grew quiet when she started to speak.

"I told my kids last week not to expect much this Christmas," she said. "Now I'm going to tell them they're going to have the greatest time of their lives."

She looked at the 700 students who sat transfixed, even on the last day before holiday break.

"Anybody can do what Ms. Frame does," she said. "I'm just lucky to be around you."

Then, with the aid of two employees, she went to teach her next class.


http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... ed284.html

Amazing.

Thanks james,
After what we've been through the past couple of weeks it's nice to read
that America is still here Baby and the more of us that stand together the harder it will be to push any of us down.

A really remarkable story. I shared it with a few of my friends online.

i loved reading this and it never ceases to amaze me what people will do for others.

DAMN we live in a great country