Judith Meyer - Volunteer Of The Month

Volunteer of the Month

Judith Meyer has served as coordinator of the Adopt a Student ministry for the last four years. She actually got involved with the program at its beginning seven years ago, when she was President of the Lutheran High School Association and a member of the School Board of King of Glory Lutheran School. At that time, Allan Buckman invited her to participate in writing a grant to the Lutheran Foundation to provide scholarships to Lutheran elementary schools and Lutheran High School South for children of immigrant and refugee families. In recent years, she has been primarily responsible for writing the renewal proposals that have secured continued funding for this ministry from the Lutheran Foundation.

Her favorite responsibility is her annual meeting with each of the students. She meets with each student to get some information about them and take their pictures. That information is turned into packets which she sends to each donor who helps support one of the approximately 25 annual student scholarships. She also turns information from these interviews into articles about students that appear in the CFNA E-Newsletter. As a member of Timothy, she enjoys seeing many of those students at church on a regular basis.

This year, she has also begun meeting regularly with the facilitators, those five people who work directly with the immigrant and refugee families to assure effective communication between families, schools and congregations. The number of students actually served by the facilitators now numbers more than 40, because many of the younger children receive Today and Tomorrow scholarships to attend Word of Life. Working with the facilitators has given her new insights into the challenges that the children and families face as they adjust to living in St. Louis.Finally, as chair of the Board of Directors of EAGLE College Prep Endeavor, a charter school enterprise in St. Louis, Judith has been working to assure that the new charter schools opened under the charter can serve immigrant and refugee children. These charter schools provide free public education, but also have Christian preschools and Christian after-school programs.