AURORA | On a bitter cold day in early January, Tudy Wicks watched a young boy without a coat shuffle toward his school.
Thinking the boy forgot his jacket or opted not wear it, Wicks, director of security for Aurora Public Schools, turned on her best mom voice.
“Where’s your coat young man?” she asked him.
The shivering elementary schooler’s answer wasn’t what she expected.
“I don’t have one,” he told her before hustling into the warm building.
It wasn’t a pleasant exchange for Wicks, and it got worse a short time later when a young girl strolled up to the school without a coat, crying because of the cold.
Later that day, in a meeting with several school resource officers from Aurora police, Wicks and Aurora police Sgt. Damon Vaz hatched a plan to help some of those kids stay warm on the coldest days.
Last month, they launched Cops, Coats and Kids, a program aimed at collecting donated winter coats for needy children.
So far, the program has donated about 200 coats to kids from nine different APS elementary schools.
Vaz said it wasn’t until word got out about the program and officials from several schools started to call that the police and Wicks realized just how many kids in Aurora don’t have a coat.
“Then we started seeing what the real need was,” he said.
Initially, the officers thought the program would be fairly small, with just a handful of coats to some particularly needy kids.
“I really didn’t think this would be a big huge thing,” he said.
And they thought the donations would largely come from a handful of officers they worked with.
They were wrong on both fronts as the program has grown to several schools and donations have flooded in from police officers, school staff and city
employees.
“Basically word of mouth took over from there and people wanted to know how they could help,” Vaz said. “It’s just gone everywhere now, churches are helping us, nonprofits are helping us, its just going everywhere”
Some people who didn’t have a coat to donate gave cash instead, Vaz said. When officers took that cash to the A + thrift store on East Colfax Avenue to buy all the children’s coats they had, the owner stepped in and donated the coats for free.
Wicks said the coats that have been donated have been in great shape, too.
“It’s surprising because a lot of these coats are brand new,” she said.
Now, Vaz said, what the program needs most are coats for the youngest elementary school children, those in kindergarten and first grade.
“By the time they are 11 or 12 if they don’t have a coat on, they’re just not wearing it — they don’t think it’s cool or whatever,” he said. “The little ones, they really don’t have a choice in the matter. The real need is for the littlest of the little ones.”
The program is also looking for hats, gloves and other cold weather gear to help kids stay warm as they walk to and from school or play outside during recess.
Coats can be donated at the Aurora Municipal Center, 15151 E. Alameda Parkway. The program has a receptacle set up in the main lobby during business hours.
The program will wrap up this year at the end of February, Vaz said, but organizers plan to launch it again next winter. Hopefully, Vaz said, they can get an earlier start next winter than they did this year.
Wicks said the program has been rewarding so far. One of the first students to get a coat was that boy she saw shivering in early January.
“I wanted to make sure we had one for him,” she said. “And we got a coat for him.”