by Dennis Dalman
After five years of volunteering as a “Foster Grandparent” at Pine Meadow Elementary School in Sartell, Kevin McCarthy is loved by the students, who call him “Grandpa Kevin,” and he loves them all (and the teachers) just as much.
During an interview with the Sartell-St. Stephen Newsleader, McCarthy, 74, who lives in St. Joseph, offered big bouquets of praise.
“I just love it,” he said. “The kids love it when they get to come and talk to me. They just love to talk with me. I’m amazed how much those kids learn even in the first grade. They are almost always happy and everybody’s always in a good mood. I treat them like my own kids. Each kid is completely different. Like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike.”
The students, he said, seem to thrive on the one-on-one contacts they have with “Grandpa McCarthy” – the kind of contact busy teachers cannot always provide.
In McCarthy’s opinion, teachers are overworked and underpaid.
“All the work they do – most people have no idea,” he said. “Besides their classroom teaching, they have a lot of meetings to attend. They work so hard, and the (other) staff and aides do too. Some teachers use their own money to buy supplies, like ones for art projects.”
McCarthy works with the first-grade students four days a week with 11 classrooms of students, spending a half hour in each one, usually in the hallway helping with two or three students at a time – sometimes more. He has lunch with the teachers. Class sizes per room are anywhere from 20 to 25 children.
“I do whatever teachers need me to do,” he said. “Helping children with reading or math or helping them with homework. And I go to different areas of the school to help with art and science. I spend one day a week in the library.”
McCarthy is a member of the Foster Grandparent program of Catholic Charities.
In 2017, his wife, Linda, died of a heart attack. Feeling devastated, lonely and restless, McCarthy was searching for some kind of social connection.
“I was retired and kind of drifting,” he said. “I mean how often can you go fishing or play golf?”
One day he was paging through a magazine in a clinic while waiting for the doctor when he saw an ad for the Foster Grandparent program. It piqued his interest instantly, partly because in the early 1990s, he’d been a substitute teacher and helped fill in, getting calls for his service from a wide area.
He applied for the Foster Grandparent program and after a background check and training, he found himself helping happily at Pine Meadow.
Raised in Albany, McCarthy studied economics at St. Cloud State University. He worked for the Social Security Administration, then in the St. Cloud Fingerhut maintenance department. He also served in the U.S. Navy for four years, stationed near Turkey and then in Italy.
He has two sons, Gary and Brian, a daughter Megan, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. His oldest daughter, Tiffany, died four years ago at age 42 due to a condition that caused her organs to shut down.
Tragedies and setbacks instilled in McCarthy expansive compassion, especially for children. Divorce, for example, can cause such sadness in children when they do not understand why, when one week they are living with their father, the next week with their mother. He said he vividly remembers a boy whose family moved to Sartell from Minneapolis. He had a hard time adjusting and could barely recite the alphabet. Together, he and the child worked an hour a day on reading, and by the time winter approached, the proud boy could read very well.
“At the end of a day I might be tired,” McCarthy said, “but I feel good, knowing I helped the kids and the teachers. They have such a tough job, and they work hard – really hard – teaching, plus getting kids to socialize, to accept discipline, to keep them on track. I wish there were more senior citizens volunteering as foster grandparents. They are so needed.”
The program
Like McCarthy, Sara Heurung also wishes there were more volunteers. Heurung is the Catholic Charities supervisor for eastern Stearns and western Benton counties.
Currently, in a 16-county area of central Minnesota, there are 172 volunteer foster grandparents. Some schools have none.
“We’d like to have 172 more,” Heurung said.
Volunteers must be 55 or older, pass background checks and complete a basic-training program. There are tax-free money stipends for seniors who qualify due to financial need.
Volunteers work with children at more than 200 sites: in schools, after-school programs, the Reach Up Head Start program, non-profit childcare centers and the “YES Network,” which provides lunches to kids in the summer as well as activities in parks.
“So many intergenerational contacts form,” Heurung said. “And the volunteers help take a load off of the teachers too.”
Heurung often visits those sites to see first-hand what a difference foster grandparents make for students and teachers.
She is hoping senior citizens will sign up for the program so hey will be trained and ready later or for next year. They can choose their sites and be assigned to just the schools or programs dove-tailed to their own skills, talents and comfort levels. In some places, they can work with teenaged students, too.
The Foster Grandparent program began nationally and locally in 1965 as one part of President Lyndon Johnson’s massive War on Poverty initiative.
To find out more about the program, visit the Catholic Charities website at ccstcloud.org and click on “Community Services.”
On last year’s Veterans Day, St. Joseph resident Kevin “Grandpa” McCarthy shared with children his memories of being in the U.S. Navy. The children are students at Sartell’s Pine Meadow Elementary School where McCarthy has volunteered for five years as a member of the “Foster Grandparent” program. The program is seeking more volunteers.
