“So because everyone worked extremely, extremely hard this year, you’re each going to get your own pair [Nike] Air Forces,” Stephanie, who goes by Teachinthe6ix online and did not want her last name included in this article, can be heard saying in the viral video posted to Instagram.
“And you’ll draw on them with markers and paint and use your creativity to design your own individual shoe that you’ll be able to keep… forever.”
The video of the gift reveal has now been viewed more than 1 million times and garnered almost 150,000 likes.
Admittedly, Stephanie didn’t expect the post to become as popular as it did and explained that she uses social media as a way to connect with her students’ parents during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The main thing was: I want the kids to be happy and I want the parents to see what’s going on,” she told CTV News Toronto.
She said that, in recent years, she felt that the connection between home and school was missing. This was especially true for the students in her class who are refugees, including those from Ukraine, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
“After we went back to school in March, a lot of them had arrived and were just fresh here in Canada. Some of them spoke English, some not so much. So I try to do community activities where everyone participates as a family.”
A self-proclaimed “sneakerhead” and true to the phrase “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” Stephanie decided to buy each student their own pair of all-white sneakers, which they could then design and decorate as they saw fit. .
With a little crowdfunding help and secretly measuring each student’s shoe size, Stephanie was able to purchase 22 pairs of the coveted shoes at $75 a pair.
After working with a local sneaker studio to source the markers and paint needed to personalize each pair, Stephanie’s students can be seen eagerly customizing their new kicks in the video with designs ranging from solar systems to rainbow prints and everything in between.
Stephanie said the reception to the video, both online and from her students’ parents, has been overwhelmingly positive, and that every design produced by her over a dozen students are “real pieces of art.”
