Carla Turchetti - newsobserver.com
Aidan Matthews, 3, uses an iPad with his teacher, Caroline Schmidt, at Frankie Lemmon School. Aidan's mother, Melissa, won an Ikea contest and will use her $100,000 to help the school.
When Melissa Matthews stumbled across the online contest while reading a home design blog, she knew immediately what she would do if she had one year and $100,000.
"When I first saw it I thought of Frankie Lemmon," said Matthews, the mother of a 3-year-old who attends the special-needs preschool in Raleigh.
So Matthews penned an essay for Ikea explaining how she would buy special technology for special kids if she won the furniture retailer's Life Improvement Sabbatical Contest. A thousand people entered. Matthews was selected as one of five finalists, and she made a video with her son for the online voting portion of the contest.
Matthews won the contest and the $100,000.
"She never said a word about it until she was announced in the top 10," said Janet Sellers, executive director of the Frankie Lemmon School and Development Center.
But once they were in the hunt, friends of Frankie Lemmon got the voting machine going.
"Thank goodness for social media," Sellers said. "Now, I'm an old lady and I don't know how all that works. But we sent email blasts, we put it on Facebook, and the Triangle Down Syndrome Network carried it day after day, reminding people to vote."
Voting opened right after Thanksgiving, and when the first results were posted, Frankie Lemmon was in fourth place. But Matthews' project went to first place the next day and stayed there until the contest ended Dec. 22.
It was an excruciating wait until Jan. 2 when Matthews received the official word she had won. And it was even harder waiting to make an official announcement two weeks later.
"That was a really hard secret to keep," Sellers said.
Room for more children
The school was founded in the 1960s by Frank and Georgia Lemmon, whose son, Frankie, had Down Syndrome. It was the first preschool in Raleigh to accept special-needs children. At that time, the school was housed at Hudson Memorial Presbyterian Church, where Frank Lemmon was a minister.
The program later moved to the basement of Hayes Barton Baptist Church, where it serves 25 children tuition-free.
Matthews will be focusing on technology purchases for the Frankie Lemmon students, and she would also like to use the money to begin a fund to find a larger home for the school so it can serve more children.
Matthews' 3-year-old son, Aidan, was originally on a waiting list for a spot at Frankie Lemmon.
"I worried about his transition to school literally from the 18-week ultrasound that revealed the markers of Down syndrome," said Matthews, a former kindergarten teacher. "When I was pregnant with him, I was wondering where he would go to school and what his life would be like."
'Unconditional love and joy'
She says she found the perfect educational environment for him at Frankie Lemmon.
"The first time I walked in I knew that was where Aidan needed to go to find unconditional love and joy," Matthews said. "It was moving to be in a place where no one asked what he couldn't do and they celebrated what he could do."
A space did open up for Aidan.
"I was Christmas-morning excited," Matthews recalls.
With part of the contest money, the school will add to its iPad inventory. Matthews says the touch screens are easier for the children to manipulate than keyboards. The youngsters use them for everything from speech lessons to selecting a snack.
The plan is also to use the money to add more Promethean Boards, interactive white boards used by students and teachers, to the classrooms.
Administrators say the availability of technology helps the school with its No. 1 mission.
"Our biggest thing is communication," Sellers said. "We want to make sure every child who comes here has a way to communicate."
For a school that relies on some funding from the state and the rest from donors, the windfall from Ikea is a blessing.
"It's exciting to win, but it's humbling to win," Matthews said. "It's a privilege and a responsibility to do the most good with the money for the largest number of children."
The school's largest fundraiser of the year, a wine dinner on Feb. 4, is still ahead, and the first installment of the contest winnings from Ikea will arrive soon after.
After an exciting few months, Matthews will begin the work of spending the $100,000.
"It's a big gift to have won the prize but it was equally a prize to be as supported by the community as we were," Matthews said. "We felt the love and it was absolutely amazing to see how much these children are loved and how much the school is loved."
