Young students at Monroe Elementary School cheered as they opened shoe boxes on Wednesday morning.
Starting with TK-kindergarten, each and every student at Monroe received a shiny new pair of kicks. It was all thanks to national nonprofit Shoes That Fit, partnering with Santa Barbara Steps Up for Monroe, a fundraiser created by longtime Shoes That Fit supporters and Santa Barbara residents Liisa and Andrew Primack.
Shoes That Fit was founded about 30 years ago in Claremont, starting with a teacher, Elodie McGuirk, who recognized that students were coming to class with shoes that were too small, or broken or full of holes, explained Liisa Primack, who moved from Claremont to Santa Barbara in 2021.
Primack has been supporting the cause since noticing a bulletin board at her local bakery in Claremont, which would list a student’s name, their age, their shoe size, and their favorite color to encourage people to buy shoes for kids in need. She would go with her family to the bakery, pick out a couple of kids, buy the shoes, and bring them back to the bakery, which would send them to Shoes That Fit to be given out to the kids that needed them.
“Like Santa Barbara, Claremont is an affluent town, but there is a lot of poverty within it that you don’t really see,” Primack said.
Now, Shoes That Fit partners with multiple brands and donors. Since 1992, the nonprofit has given away more than two million shoes to kids across the country. More than 300 students at Monroe — a small school with a socioeconomically disadvantaged population of 72 percent — joined that cohort on Wednesday.
“We moved to Santa Barabra, and we thought, ‘We need to do something for Santa Barbara,’ so this is where we landed,” Primack said. “This seemed like a good place to start. Since a lot of people don’t know about Shoes That Fit, it was about bringing awareness so we can build on the program now.”
