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For Immediate Release
 Fathers and Children Rehab Center For Homeless and Abused Women
Union Savings Bank, Walsh Built Homes, and COACH Ministry have teamed up to help rehab the Care Center, a ministry of Wheeler Mission. On Sunday May 22nd, beginning at 9:00am, the three organizations will donate time, money and supplies to help makeover the Center, located at 23 N Rural. Families, including many children, from each of these organizations are volunteering their time to paint, lay a new floor and clean up and beautify the property with mulch and other landscaping products.
The Care Center
The Care Center provides shelter, food and clothing for hundreds of women and children. The women find these vital needs supplied, but they also experience love and compassion, bringing rest for their weary souls. In 2004, the Center provided 23,527 nights of lodging to homeless women and mothers with children, an average of 64 each night. National trends in the study of the homeless indicate that the fastest growing segment of the homeless population consist of women and mothers with children, making the services offered at the Care Center imperative to our community.
The average stay at the Care Center is three months. During that time ladies are given Biblical counseling, job readiness training, job leads, educational assessment and tutoring, medical services, addiction counseling and encouragement to enter one of our long term residential programs. Everyone who seeks assistance from the Center is given the necessities of food, clothing and shelter.
COACH Ministry
C.O.A.C.H. (Children Of an Authentic Christian Heart) will change the hearts of fathers and children throughout the world. C.O.A.C.H. believes that a person's heart is the most critical part of their Christian walk. If a person allows Christ to touch their hearts, He will do amazing things by changing their outlook on life. Their focus shifts from selfish desires and beliefs to eternal impact. The paradigm shift will have a lasting affect on multiple generations.
Therefore, the goals of C.O.A.C.H. are to impact fathers and children throughout the world by creating authentic relationships that will last a lifetime. C.O.A.C.H. Ministry helps facilitate these relationships by writing curriculum designed for intimate conversations, creating events and games that connect other fathers and children and establishing a servant's heart by bringing fathers and his children into the community serving its' constituents through projects, fundraisers, manual labor, spending time with people and sharing what Christ has done in their lives.
For more information on COACH Ministry and 24 Dates With My Dad, call Todd Melloh at 317-417-3525 or email him at todd@coachministry.com.
Here are some excerpts from the First Lady's recent speech.
"Now we must extend these reforms to America's high schools. Many of those who graduate from high school go on to a community college, and as each of you know, community colleges are doing a lot of remedial education for these high school graduates. As a mother, a former school teacher, myself, and a school librarian, I've always cared about the education of children. Last year, I began visiting middle schools and high schools that are using the new research-based curriculum to bring middle and high school students up to grade level in reading. And of course, a majority of students in these remedial and early intervention classes in reading are boys.
The statistics on boys are particularly alarming. Boys begin to fall behind girls in elementary school, in fact, nearly 70 percent of students in special education classes are boys. In high school, the boys fall even further behind and more girls go on to college than boys. Today, women earn an average of 57 percent of all bachelors' degrees and 58 percent of all masters' degrees in the United States. Boys are more likely than girls to commit crimes and to be a victim of violent crime. The Department of Justice estimates that more than 90 percent of gang members in large cities are boys. And by the age 18, boys are 17 times more likely than girls to be in jail or prison.
I've been traveling across the country to learn more about the challenges young people face and I'm highlighting effective prevention and intervention programs so that parents and community leaders can learn about what works. Last week, I visited an elementary school in Baltimore that's working to promote academic success in their youngest students. Through the Good Behavior Game, 1st graders learn how to be students. The children are divided into teams and given rules to follow, very simple rules. And if a student talks out, the entire team receives a check for bad behavior. Dr. Shep Kellams from the AIR, the American Institute of Research in Baltimore, devised the game based on the theory that children had to be taught how to be good students, that it's not intuitive.
He studied the program's effectiveness for the last 20 years and the results are profound. Students are less likely -- less aggressive and disruptive, and remarkably, 86 percent of the children who were in the 1st grade Good Behavior Game graduated from high school, compared to just 19 percent of their peers. The Good Behavior Game is a very inexpensive curriculum that schools can adopt easily in their 1st grade.
In northeast Philadelphia, I visited a Boys and Girls Club that had a Passport to Manhood Passport to Manhood program, and a lot of Boys and Girls Clubs around the country and overseas on our military bases have these Passport to Manhood classes. Here, boys ages 8 to 16 meet to talk about how they can build successful lives so they can become successful young men. Boys talk with their leader, a young man, about the characteristics that men should have, and the character traits that they want to have. They talked about respect for themselves and respect for other people, and they even talked about love. How many -- how often have you heard a little group of boys 8 to 16 talk about love? Not very often, I can assure you.
By focusing on character development, Boys and Girls Clubs are helping young people across the country. And research shows that in the neighborhood where there is a Boys and Girls Club, there's generally a reduction in vandalism, drug trafficking and youth crime.
 And last Thursday, I visited a terrific program in Detroit called Think Detroit. This program connects children with a team and a coach who loves them. Think Detroit coaches use positive character development to teach children life lessons through sports. Today in Detroit, more than 650 coaches volunteer their time to mentor thousands of young people across the city.
Many young people today are growing up with a single parent in a single parent home. And too many boys are growing up without fathers. Coaches and male teachers make great, great role models for boys. We must encourage more men and more minorities to become teachers."
-----First Lady Laura Bush, February 2005.
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