Brooklyn Teacher Raises Money for Low-Income Students Who Go Home Hungry: ‘I Want to Make Sure My Students are Fed and Have the Energy to Come School and Want to Learn’

A Brooklyn teacher is raising money to feed her kindergartners who have been coming to school hungry.

Laurie Gurdal, 45, asks her students to write about their dreams as an assignment every year. One of her students’ dreams was to be able to come home to a fridge full of food. “That broke my heart,” says Gurdal, who teaches 22 students at PS 245.” He didn’t have any food to go home to.”

Alarmed by the child’s revelation, Gurdal decided to go above and beyond her role as a teacher and provide her kids, mostly from low-income families, with food. During the school year, Gurdal started saving the extra food from the free breakfasts and lunches the school provided to children. She would then give the extra meals to hungry students to take home.

“I feel really bad for them,” she says. “It is so sad.” She added that the COVID-19 pandemic has made it harder for families financially. “It’s really upsetting,” Gurdal tells PEOPLE. “I know nutrition is a big part of thinking and being able to come to school and not worry about stuff like that.” Gurdal moved to buy snacks for students with her own money. As a single mom herself, spending money on food started to get pricey, with her dropping more than $500. “It was getting expensive,” she told PEOPLE.

Creating a food pantry was Gurdal’s next move to alleviate the issue. On March 7, she kicked off a fundraiser on DonorsChoose, a non-profit that lets people donate directly to public school classroom projects. Her fundraiser is asking donors for money that will go toward school supplies, technology, and more. Since its launch, all 22 of her students have gone home with a full bag of groceries on three different occasions, PEOPLE reports.

Gurdal hopes her food pantry will grow big enough to provide students with a bag of groceries one Friday a month. “I want to make sure my students are fed and have the energy to come to school and want to learn,” she says. “They’re good kids. They want to learn.”