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Miami Palmetto High School senior Kayla Klurman is the Palmetto Silver Knight nominee in the Vocational-Technical category. Her Silver Knight project, called Kayla’s Care Bags, helps foster children in transition.
“I started donating different types of items to foster children,” she says.
Her interest in the needs of foster children came after meeting a foster child on her first day of high school.
“In 2019, I partnered with a school in Homestead,” she says. “This was the first school in Miami-Dade where the school offered an overnight stay.”
Klurman explains that when foster children are moved from a home, they are often taken to a place to wait until they can go to their new situation. This school is now a way station for the children.
Her project started out creating bags filled with three outfits, deodorant, a book. make-up for girls, a doll or a stuffed animal that they could take to their new place.
“They could have bags to go to their new home,” she says. “To the best of my ability help them adjust to a new home.”
When she first stared, most of the donations she received were gently used goods from family, friends. When she created an Instagram account, several small companies contacted her and asked if they could donate. Those donations included new clothes, new lunch boxes and jewelry for the girls. The jewelry had little charms on them.
The children would get a bag in duffel bags, book bags or backpacks, which replaced the trash bags previously used to move their possessions.
Over the years, she estimates she’s made 100-200 pre-made bags for teen girls, teen boys and babies.
“At first, the bags were a good idea, when more children were being brought to the school,” Klurman says. “Eventually these bags were transformed into a closet.”
The resource closet allowed the kids to pick the items they needed.
“The closet is big, and it’s full of items. I drop off donations every Friday,” she says. “It’s a whole SUV full, probably six to 15 garbage bags of clothing and items. There were weeks during corona where it was harder to collect, but more often than not it’s carsful.”
When she goes away for college, she hopes her brother, Jordan, will keep the program going.
Klurman has tutored children who need help in language arts. She has strong opinions about the right to a good education and access to a good education and puts her beliefs into action through tutoring. She’s witnessed how children gain confidence in their academics and find that rewarding.
She teaches them good study habits, basic concepts, testing skills and work ethics in language arts.
“I love English. It’s my strong suit,” she says. “I thought it would be best to tutor children in English because that’s what I know the most.”
She’s the historian of the English Honor Society, the secretary of HOSA, a member of the National Honor Society and the Italian Honor Society.
She’s a member of the Miami-Dade County Youth Commission, appointed by now Mayor Daniela Levine Cava. She joined last June so the meetings she’s attended have been via Zoom. One of the issues they discussed was advocating for millennials being able to register to vote.
Klurman was excited about voting in her first presidential election.
“I want to go into political science,” she says. “I want to study law and become an attorney.
Then move up in politics and become either a senator or a judge.”
Klurman will attend Davidson College on a Posse Scholarship.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
