Jane Silverstein didn't know Kenza Kadmiry and hadn't heard about the high school senior's tragedy. Neither did most of the two dozen other parents at the Cleveland High magnet school's monthly meeting.
But when Mike Kadmiry took the mike and told them about his daughter -- the accident that left her paralyzed, the months his family spent beside her hospital bed, the experimental treatment that might help her walk again -- the tears flowed and the checkbooks came out.
By the meeting's end, "there was not a dry eye in the house," Silverstein recalled. And they had collected $3,000.
Kadmiry was grateful and amazed. But it was what came next that refueled his exhausted family.
In the six weeks since, those parents have shared Kenza's story with their church groups and yoga classes, in the office and the beauty salon, while they were buying groceries and pumping gas. They scoured the Internet for treatment options. Some called in chits from high-powered friends.
"All these women, doing things I can't imagine anybody -- even my family -- doing," Kadmiry told me. "Every day, every week, they call, they e-mail, they send me literature. They have doctors call me from all over the world.
"It is shocking to me. But in a very good way. She is not their daughter. . . . But they say, 'We will not stop. We will do whatever you need.' Like we are their own family."
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In an era when extended families are scattered, neighbors hardly know one another and churches tend toward the large and impersonal, school is the new community.
When Donna Ruiz's 35-year-old husband, Mauricio, died in April, Fullbright Avenue Elementary raised $1,700 selling cupcakes and pizza at its open house to help the family with living expenses. When Taft High freshman Jennifer Perla was killed in a car accident on her way to the prom last weekend, the school collected more than $5,000 to help pay for her funeral.
But it was not just the money these families mentioned when I called to ask about their tragedies.
For the Perla family, it was the sense that so many cared: The assistant principal who showed up in her prom dress at the emergency room. The students who spent the weekend making pink-ribbon pins to sell on campus. The teachers who helped make a video to show at her funeral.
