Virginia Tech alumni join project to craft hundreds of desks for Alexandria students

This fall, Eimy Romero, 9, started school virtually from her family’s living room table. It was the only space that her family could carve out for her in their Alexandria apartment.

But it posed a problem when the family wanted to eat. Eimy had to move all of her school materials from the table each time.

For the past few months, home has been a classroom for children around the country, who like Eimy, have had to make space in their bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens for virtual learning due to the coronavirus pandemic and its limitations on in-person teaching.

But several weeks ago, Eimy’s situation changed. She received a desk of her own — for free. Now, when she takes classes she sits at her desk in her family’s living room.

“She likes it a lot. It’s her space, and she likes to have her own things organized there,” said Margarita Romero, Eimy’s mom, through a Spanish translator. Via Zoom, Romero pointed out the places in the desk where Eimy hangs her earphones and stacks her school materials.

Eimy’s desk, made with pieces of plywood and tall dividers, was provided by Building Momentum, an Alexandria creative problem-solving company that has been giving away easy-to-assemble desks to children in the city since the start of the school year.

The idea for the desk project came to two executives at Building Momentum, Allen Brooks and Brad Halsey, when the school year began virtually for their own children. They saw students like Eimy from their children’s computer screens when they logged on for class.

“As we were looking through our kids’ Zoom channels, we could see kids who were taking class from their beds or were in community centers,” said Brooks, who is chief operating officer for the company. Desks, for many, were not in sight, he said.

Cue the desk project and a group of Virginia Tech alumni who have been helping to prepare the materials.

“We had the tools and capacity and the abilities as a team to build a desk that could be relatively quickly built and distributed to the community,” Brooks said.

Each desk is crafted from five pieces of unfinished plywood and four wooden pegs. The pegs can be used as hooks for students to hang backpacks or headphones.

The plywood goes up around the sides of each desk as blinders, giving students privacy and acting as a guard from coughs and sneezes.

The desks have been delivered to children in their own homes and to community centers. Any family in Alexandria and the Washington, D.C., metro area can request a desk.

Since families assemble the desks themselves, the goal was to make them as easy as possible to put together, Brooks said.

“The whole desk goes together in less than five minutes,” he said. “It’s rock solid. The most important thing we can do is to make it so that no one has to buy anything to put it together themselves.”

Building Momentum prepares the materials for each desk at its warehouse with the help of numerous local volunteers, including a group of Virginia Tech alumni who live in the Washington, D.C., metro area. 

Kathryn Santerre, who is community service director for the DC Hokies, a Virginia Tech alumni chapter, heard about the project and thought it would be a great way for her fellow alumni to help residents of Alexandria. It’s the same community where the university’s future Innovation Campus will be located. By 2024, Virginia Tech plans to open this new Alexandria campus for graduate students studying computer science, computer engineering, and related subjects.

Some volunteers take four-hour work shifts at Building Momentum during the week, while others, like Santerre, have been working Saturday shifts.

“As an alumni association we are always looking for ways to get involved and give back to the community,” she said.

Recently, Santerre helped Building Momentum deliver about 50 desks to Casa Chirilagua, a nonprofit organization that offers community programs for children and families. The organization is located in a Latino neighborhood in Alexandria.

Some of the desks will stay at the nonprofit to be used as workspaces for students who take virtual classes from the center. Others were delivered to families with whom Casa works, including Eimy Romero’s family.

“A lot of our students live in highly dense homes,” said Adriana Gómez Schellhaas, executive director of Casa. “A lot of times families share an apartment. It’s very rare that a student would have their own space to do their work, let alone their own room.”

Recently, during the Casa desk delivery, Santerre watched as the children saw the new desks for the first time.

“It was really cool to see the kids go in and sit down at the desks and hang their backpacks up,” she said. “There are little areas where kids can set up their iPads and computers and hang backpacks on a hook. It’s nice that they have that privacy and a functional learning environment.”

As of mid-November, Building Momentum had received more than 300 requests for desks and about 150 had been delivered. Brooks said the desk project will continue as long as monetary donations and volunteers are available. Each desk costs about $80 to make. Building Momentum even hired three new employees as official desk makers.

There will continue to be a need for the desks even after the pandemic is over, he said.

“The moment makes you realize the need,” he said. “When they are back in schools, the economic realities of these families are not going to change.”

By Jenny Kincaid Boone