Silicon Valley couple to start a school for disadvantaged youth

HAVE YOU ever dreamed what you would do if you had access to millions of dollars?

Paying off all my debts, would be No. 1 for me; set up my children to live comfortably, then onto the pie-in-the-sky things: travel the world, donate to charities,  (hell, start my own nonprofit foundation), buy/build a house in Hawaii, San Francisco, etc. It's nice to dream.

Here's what Priscilla Chan did: Start a school in the low-income city of East Palo Alto to help the most disadvantaged families of that city.

Priscilla Chan has the millions of dollars as the wife of Mark Zuckerberg. You know, THE Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame.

Priscilla Chan

The multi-billionaires have been donating to charitable causes for a number of years: millions of dollars to New Jersey schools, millions fo college scholarships to undocumented students,  and millions to San Francisco General Hospital where she is a primary care physician.

Chan, a former elementary science teacher who tutored in Boston's housing projects, she has also worked with low-income patients at various hospitals in San Francisco. She soon realized that there was a limit that she could do to help her patients and students, Their problems stemmed from outside the walls of the medical facility or school. 

Chan recognizes - as numerous studies have shown - there is a link between a child's ability to learn and that child's physical and mental health. Health is impacted by a variety of ills - violence, diet, dysfunctional family life - that can't be cured by pills or injections. 

"There is something physiologically happening early in life that changes a child's trajectory," Chan told the San Jose Mercury News' Sharon Noguchi.

That's why she is partnering with the Ravenswood Family Health Center to get the first batch of students for The Primary School that already has secured a site in East Palo Alto. She hasn't revealed what she is donating to the school, but you can be sure the school won't be lacking for funds.

She hopes that The Primary School could become a model that can be replicated elsewhere.

Not everybody in the 1% can use their vast fortunes to help others less fortunate than they. Its nice to dream, but its even better to be able to make those dreams come true. 

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