Dozens of volunteers from School on Wheels and Bazic Products joined forces to set two Guinness World Records by assembling the longest line of school backpacks: 7,039 in one hour. The previous record was 6,000.
“You have accomplished the feat!” said Michael Empric, official adjudicator and spokesperson for Guinness World Records based in New York City, to the volunteers and more than 200 low-income families served by Schools on Wheels.
More than 200 low-income and homeless families, as well as families of immigrants recently arrived in the United States and served by School on Wheels, attended the event held at the facilities of Bazic Products, a company that manufactures school and office supplies, in the city of El Monte.
After hearing the verdict from the official Guinness World Records judge, Handy Hioe, president of Bazic Products, jumped for joy as he received the two certificates endorsing the world records.
Help the needy
To achieve the first Guinness World Record, volunteers from Schools on Wheels and Bazic Products lined up 7,000 backpacks.
Once this record was verified by Guinness official judge Michael Empric, they broke the second world record of the day and filled 7,039,000 backpacks with school supplies in one hour, starting at 10:15 a.m.
Hioe’s idea to celebrate her company’s 25th anniversary began in January with her participation in the 135th annual Rose Parade in Pasadena.
“I thought it was a fun way to entertain the community, and from now on we want to intensify the help, get closer to people and give.”
Handy Hioe said that despite the exhaustion of packing backpacks with school supplies, “to make this happen for homeless people and children, it’s just incredible. It’s amazing. It’s a priceless feeling.”
However, the cost of the 7,039 backpacks with school supplies meant an investment of more than $200,000.
Backpacks for students in six counties
Officials from School on Wheels, the nonprofit organization that serves homeless students in kindergarten through 12th grade at 40 locations across six Southern California counties: Los Angeles, Orange, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura, will distribute the backpacks before the next school year.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) alone, 9,140 homeless students were reported, a 9% increase compared to the previous academic year.
At the same time, this situation increased the need for more tutors to teach children where they live: in the Skid Row area or in homeless shelters.
“Some of those students came back and volunteered to help break the two world records,” Evans said. “I think that’s what’s great about the organization: When you’re young and you’re getting help, you usually want to help others; you give back to your community.”
This is the goal that School on Wheels pursues with the immigrant children who receive help, so that they can then return and help other children.
“Hopefully, in 30 years we won’t exist because homelessness will be eradicated,” Evans said. “But until then, the mission continues. That’s the beauty of our mission: compassion and dignity for the human being.”
El Monte City Councilwoman Marisol Cortés said she was proud to have participated in the event and to witness the help provided to families in need of backpacks and school supplies for their children.
“I’ve been here in El Monte for 30 years; at one point my family was also low-income when I was growing up,” he said. “We should feel proud that there is someone who wants to help us get ahead.”
The deputy mayor, Julia Ruedas, expressed herself in the same way.
“We have a high percentage of families who need help; in the El Monte school district that I lead, in addition to information resources, families need to acquire school supplies for their children when they return to school,” he stressed. “And to help, we all need to come together.”
Indeed, of the total of 9,812 residents in the city of El Monte, 18.8% of them, or 15,004 people, live below the poverty line. The annual per capita income is $24,150 or $61,625 for a medium-sized family.
They don’t want Latino families in shelters
Kimberly Cuzcano, a Peruvian woman who has only been living in the United States for 10 months, was at the School on Wheels event with her three daughters: Sofia, 10, Ashley, nine, and Mia, six.
Sofia suffers from autism, as does Ashley, although she also has no hearing in her left ear, while Mia suffers from myopia.
“We are living in a shelter in the city of San Pedro,” Kimberly said. “My husband’s family is [Carlos Cubas] He threw us out onto the streets.”
Kimberly said living in the shelter is “difficult.”
“They get us out of bed at 7:30 in the morning, and then they send us to the roof,” he said. The “roof” is the upper part of a building where they spend the day mitigating the ravages of the heat outdoors.
Kimberly is eight months pregnant and although she complained about the “horrible” situation at the shelter, she said that she is better “because there is freedom for us and for my children.”
For her part, Jocelys González, originally from the El Paraíso Department, Honduras, has only been in the Los Angeles area for a month, along with her seven-year-old son Gael and her husband, Erick Fonseca.
“They don’t want us Latinos at the shelter; the black people there tell us to leave, that the help there isn’t for us,” said Jocelys, who also described the odyssey of having crossed through Mexico to reach the United States.
“The whole journey was dangerous,” he said. “Thank God nothing happened to us, especially when we were in a shelter in Monterrey, where four people were killed.”
Luisana Escalona, Venezuelan mother of five children: Carlos (16), Eudimar (15), Justin (13), Carlos Alexander (11) and Brittany (3) announced that she arrived in the United States last May.
“We have to keep going,” she said. “We will achieve everything, even though there is a lot of discrimination in the shelter where we are; black people tell us that we should not be there…we came to fight for a better life for our children and nothing will stop us.”