Success Stories
Desire Street Academy
Video Transcript
Danny Wuerffel, executive director of Desire Street Academy: "Man, it's an incredible story how we ended up here. It would probably take a whole book to give all the details. But the short end of it is, we were looking for a place to have our school. We actually thought we had a place, so we were moving forward and when that fell through we were really in a bind. So we started looking around at different places and someone heard of this camp.
"It was just by chance that I was driving to Florida and got the chance to meet with some of the people there and we worked out an arrangement where they made it available for us.
"One of the amazing things about how we got here is there're several places here that were ideal, but some of the buildings didn't have the classroom space we needed. It was almost like one of those Extreme Home Makeovers or While You Were Out or something where I was here one week and there weren't classrooms. I went and did some things and came back and we had eight classrooms that were built in less than a week. It was really amazing how it came to be.
"If we hadn't found this location, it's a great question of where we would have ended up and what would have happened. There's a great chance we wouldn't have found a place in time to create the school system before kids would start slipping through the cracks and staff would have to move on to other things. So the time factor was critical.
"From the university helping to make it available, it's really not--it doesn't fit what the purposes of the camp were for the year, but they made it available for us at the time we needed it. And the staff has been wonderful here. Bob and Candace Walker have just been joys to work with.
"It's been quite an adjustment, but it's been a great opportunity and we feel blessed."
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