Sleeping bag drive shares warmth

DOVER -- Like almost every parent, Meika Toth wants her child -- 4 1/2-year-old Ayden -- to be safe and warm at night. She wants him to thrive and she is able to help him do it. Ayden has his own bed and his own room, with pictures of John Deere tractors on the wall.

But Toth also wants her son to think about kids who don't have as much.

So Tuesday afternoon, she picked up her little boy at preschool and brought him to Legislative Hall, sleeping bag in hand, to help launch a statewide "Sleeping Bag Campaign."

Ayden said he has never slept in a sleeping bag himself, because he hasn't gone camping yet. But he understood Tuesday that this bag wasn't going camping. This sleeping bag would go to a kid who didn't have a bed.

That's life for more than 2,600 children in Delaware, said Wendy Strauss of the Governor's Advisory Council for Exceptional Children which is overseeing the project.

"It's so sad," Ayden's mother said as she held her son on her knee. "I just can't imagine there are that many kids."

It's probably many more than that 2008 figure now, after a year when thousands of families lost jobs, homes and rainy-day savings.

The 30 beds at The Shepherd Place have been filled all summer, said Jessica Hazzard, a case manager at the Dover shelter. Usually, the number of people drops off in warmer months.

"People who are working at lower-income jobs, losing their jobs, losing their apartment -- where do you go?" Hazzard said. "A lot of those people have children."

Homelessness is a far more complicated problem than a sleeping-bag drive can solve.

But sleeping bags represent something important to the kids who will get them -- warmth, comfort, stability -- said Vivian Rapposelli, secretary of the Kids Dept., more formally known as the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and their Families.

"This provides protection, if even just for a good night's sleep," Rapposelli said.

Several groups around the state already have started their collections, and Toth hopes her son's preschool will join the effort, too. Students from Polytech High School brought the 51 sleeping bags they collected in one week's time, Attorney General Beau Biden's office sent 50. In addition to sleeping bags, students at Salesianum and Nativity Prep are collecting books for homeless kids, Strauss said.

The sleeping-bag collection continues until Dec. 20, with dropoff spots in every county. A list of collection sites will be available today on the Web site of the state Developmental Disabilities Council at www.state.de.us/ddc, state officials said.