BEAUMONT, Texas — You have a chance to help a kid in need. Wednesday morning from 7:30 until 9 a.m., Sallie Curtis Elementary will be accepting toy donations.
The toys will go to something called the "poke box" at Texas Children's Hospital.
Every day, hundreds of children at Texas Children's Hospital get poked.
"Which can mean port access, shots, chemo treatments of any kind," said mother Holly Gallier.
But it's actually become the best part of a terrible day.
"The toys, and the donations, and the prizes, and the poke prizes for us specifically, that's what gets you through the day," said Holly Gallier.
"That poke prize got Grey off the elevator on a lot of days," said Dustin Gallier.
Each poke at Texas Children's comes with a prize.
Dustin and Holly Gallier's son Grey was diagnosed with leukemia in January 2019.
Those prizes helped him get through. Dustin Gallier said his son Grey built up hundreds.
"I mean, Grey works the crowd pretty good. He had the nurses right around his fingers," Dustin Gallier said.
Charities were donating the toys until COVID-19 hit.
"COVID came in and it just wiped them out, it really took the legs out from a lot of these charities that had been there for decades,” said Holly Gallier. "And Grey would say, 'There's no good prizes left.' He would check it out and say, 'There's no good prizes.'"
The toys weren't coming in like they used to.
So, Colleen Leviner, a kindergarten teacher at Sallie Curtis and a close friend of Grey and the Gallier's, decided to help.
"Just became determined that the box would not go empty again,” Leviner said. “That’s when I went to Ms. Tripplet, my principal, to ask if we could start a contest at the school, annually, to make sure we kept the poke prize box full, and it was all inspired by Grey."
For the last two years, it's been a competition with each classroom to see who can bring in the most poke prizes.
"Last year it was overwhelming. You couldn't walk in my room. I think we had right around 10,000 prizes," Leviner said.
Since June of 2021, Grey has been cancer-free, but he still goes back to the hospital as a delivery man.
"And he gets to deliver them directly to the people who have been giving this to him so long…” said Holly Gallier. "He was going to make sure that this poke prize thing stayed alive.”
