The recipient of this week's Ben's Bell is Lori Escalante, of Escalante Concrete, who is helping inner-city students build a foundation for success.
She was nominated by Sam Harrington, behavioral intervention monitor at Prince Elementary, who said Escalante was eager to help the school.
"We asked many to help … but with the economy crisis, construction slowdowns, massive layoffs and incomes plummeting, we didn't get much response until Lori Escalante," Harrington wrote in his nomination.
The school was soliciting funding to provide students with T-shirts to engender school pride.
Prince Elementary, he wrote, "is an inner city school where 92 percent of our students receive free breakfast and lunch. Our kids have limited identities, but mainly an identity of poverty. With this in mind, we wanted to provide them with T-shirts which would identify them as Prince Mustangs and thus be a part of and belong to something."
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Escalante's donation has allowed the school to give a new T-shirt to each of its 650 kindergarten through fifth-graders annually for three years. More recently, her company built a huge sandbox for the school's playground.
"This comes from a business that is struggling during these tough times, yet has the time to help us," Harrington wrote.
After helping the school buy the T-shirts, Escalante and her husband, Louis, were invited to a school assembly in their honor.
"It was overwhelming. The children decorated the school with 'thank you' posters, they presented us with 'thank you' letters. It was really beautiful," Escalante said. "It was amazing the number of children who came up to us after the assembly and they hugged us and they asked us what we do. It was really sweet and it meant a lot to us."
Contact reporter Kimberly Matas at kmatas@azstarnet.com or at 573-4191.