Celebrating birthdays

Emerson High School is Oklahoma City Public Schools’ alternative high school. For most students, it’s a last attempt to stay in school and get an education. One of the programs on campus, The Teen Outreach Program or TOP, helps teen mothers. For TOP students in Randa Pirrong’s career orientation class, birthdays are a special event. Volunteers from St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City, bring food and cake to the school every month to help the students celebrate their birthdays. Pirrong says that for some of the students, who now have children of their own, this is the first birthday party they’ve ever had.

-John Clanton