The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: A teacher, her son and a lesson in giving that benefited our foundation

Our foundation has benefited from countless fundraisers across Middlesex County, each of which has touched us deeply and for which we are forever indebted.

But stories such as the one you are about to read have a way of tugging at your heartstrings.

Six-year-old Landon Cardoso, son of Stephanie Cardoso, a fifth-grade teacher at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Edison, selected The Marisa Tufaro Foundation as the beneficiary of a fundraiser he conducted during a yard sale in front of his house earlier this month.

Stephanie showed Landon videos of several charities and allowed him to select the nonprofit for which he wanted to raise money. Landon chose ours!

He created coloring books, helped his mom bake cookies for sale and distributed brochures about our foundation.

In addition to spreading the word about our nonprofit, Landon raised $50!

His grassroots effort is reminiscent of a fundraiser the daughters of Kelly Ohlson, a third-grade teacher at Woodbrook Elementary School, also in Edison, conducted last August. The Ohlson sisters erected a lemonade stand in front of their house to raise money for our foundation.

Marisa’s father, Greg, a reporter for the Home News Tribune, had the privilege of writing a remarkable story in 2013 about the amazing connection between Stephanie Cardoso’s class and their peers at another school in Oklahoma, who miraculously survived a massive tornado.

Please take a moment to read the story below, which will help those who don’t know Stephanie better understand why she was named ABC World News Person of the Week in 2013, a “Teacher Who Makes Magic” in 2014 for educating students about the importance of community service outreach through philanthropic endeavors and Middlesex County Teacher of the Year in 2015.

The apple – in the case of young Landon’s desire to help others – apparently doesn’t fall far from the tree.

EDISON — The contents of a large brown envelope, ordinary in appearance except for an Oklahoma postmark, proved to be more precious than Stephanie Cardoso could have imagined.

The fifth-grade teacher at Martin Luther King Elementary School received the mailing May 17, three days before a massive tornado struck Oklahoma City and its suburbs, killing 24 people, nine of them children.

She didn’t open the envelope from another fifth-grade class until two days after the violent twister had touched down, demolishing much in its path, including two elementary schools in Moore.

Cardoso, whose fifth-graders took part in the Great Mail Race, a project in which students write to peers at a randomly selected school in each of the 50 states with the hope of exchanging information about classes and communities, had no reason to believe the package that sat on her desk over the weekend was any more special than the other responses she received.

The envelope, however, contained photographs and 23 handwritten letters, one from each of the students in heroic teacher Robin Dziedzic’s fifth-grade class at Briarwood Elementary School, which the 1.3-mile-wide tornado destroyed.

“I compare (the odds) to winning the $600 million Powerball lottery,” Martin Luther King Principal Diane Wilton said of her school’s budding relationship with Briarwood through the Great Mail Race. “What are the chances of it happening? It really gave us chills and goose bumps.”

The pagelong letters, with a photo of Dziedzic’s entire class serving as a centerpiece, now adorn a bulletin board inside Cardoso’s room.

They provide an indelible reminder of the odds-defying connection between two schools separated by 1,500 miles but united by newfound friendship.

“I feel so close to this stranger,” Cardoso said of Dziedzic, with whom she spoke for the first time on Skype for more than an hour Tuesday after the two had been in contact via Facebook and email multiple times daily for the past two weeks. “An interesting friendship has come out of a total act of randomness.”

The single package Dziedzic mailed since has been returned nearly 300-fold as Cardoso’s school already has collected about 280 items of need for Briarwood students, many of whose homes were damaged or destroyed.

“Practically the first words out of (Cardoso’s) mouth were we want to do a donation drive for you,” said Dziedzic, noting she took solace in “knowing there was something I could immediately grab onto and do for these (Briarwood) students based on the generosity of this new friendship.”

Shipments have arrived at Dziedzic’s storm-damaged home with such overwhelming frequency — she posted a video on her Facebook page of a UPS driver rolling hand trucks of neatly stacked boxes through her front door — that Cardoso now is limiting donations to gift cards.

Cardoso and Dziedzic, along with their students, are scheduled to connect via Skype today on ABC’s “World News With Diane Sawyer.” The interaction will be the first between the students since Cardoso opened the envelope from Briarwood on May 22.

She did so at the request of Akhilash Parimeru, the Martin Luther King student who wrote the Great Mail Race letter to Briarwood. He told an incredulous Cardoso the package on her desk was from one of the schools the tornado demolished. After sharing the contents of the brown envelope with her students, Cardoso conducted an Internet search of Briarwood on her classroom computer, which is connected to an interactive Smart Board that projects an image on a screen for all to see. The first photographs of Briarwood to appear were juxtaposed views of the school.

“The top half was the school in its original form and the bottom half was the school after the tornado,” Cardoso said. “There was no denying it. The students and I were all in a moment of shock.

“The hardest part for all of us is we didn’t know if they were OK. We were holding these letters from these children, and at the same time we didn’t know if they were safe. We didn’t know if they were even alive. So there was really a somber mood in the classroom. At that moment, the whole room was silent, which isn’t something that always happens in fifth grade.

“While we looked at these (photos), I didn’t want to go too deep (investigating) with them in the room because you don’t know what you are going to find.”

The following day, a cellphone video Dziedzic recorded of the tornado striking her school, with winds estimated to be 210 mph, aired on CNN and ABC. The video since has gone viral.

Dziedzic can be heard calming crying students, shouting over the roar of the tornado, “It’s almost over,” “It’s OK,” as she huddled with more than 20 of them in a darkened cinder block bathroom.

Once the tornado passed, Dziedzic opened the door and walked into a hallway to provide the viewer with a scene of utter destruction. She repeatedly cries, “Oh, my God!” with children screaming in the background.

Cardoso said she believes the video is “way too disturbing” for her students, some of whom have watched it anyway with their parents’ permission.

“When we found the images posted on the Internet, we were all speechless and shocked,” said Thomas Lim, one of Cardoso’s students. “When we looked deeper into the topic and we saw all the videos of them being taken out of the rubble that the tornado caused, just seeing all of their school — even the littlest pencils were destroyed — it was very sad and very hard to handle.”

Another of Cardoso’s fifth-graders asked if she would “lie on top of us,” as Dziedzic and other Briarwood teachers did to protect their students.

Dziedzic, whose son, a fourth-grader, and daughter, a first-grader, also attend Briarwood, said it is a miracle everyone at her school survived, especially considering seven children at nearby Plaza Towers Elementary School, which the tornado also destroyed, died in the twister.

She said a Briarwood prekindergarten student and her 7-month-old sister, both at home when the tornado struck, were ripped from their mother’s arms and killed. Dziedzic attended a funeral for the siblings last weekend.

Cardoso’s class displayed the same empathy toward Briarwood that it previously felt toward students at Memorial Elementary School in Union Beach, for whom they collected and personally delivered more than $2,500 worth of school supplies and books after superstorm Sandy similarly destroyed that school and its community.

Dziedzic said her students were given the choice to write back to a school in Colorado, which also contacted Briarwood through the Great Mail Race, or Martin Luther King. They chose the latter, she said, because Parimeru’s letter included details of his school’s Union Beach donation drive.

“They thought that was neat,” Dziedzic said. “I didn’t think to get anything from (participating) other than it being a nice writing lesson for my students.”

“When we got these letters (from Briarwood) we felt so sad because all those kids wrote back to us and we wanted to do something to help them,” Martin Luther King fifth-grader Aaron Neogy said. “Since they lost all their stuff in their homes, we decided to start a fundraiser for them to collect all sorts of games, toys and books.”

Cardoso’s class feels a direct connection to Briarwood because each of the letters from Dziedzic’s students revealed something personal — favorite musicians, hobbies, pets, siblings, etc. The letters also detailed life at Briarwood and the surrounding area.

“I like to go to Warren Theater or visit a restaurant for a night out!” one of Dziedzic’s students wrote. “Moore has nice people, great fast-food places, 7-11’s along with CVS’s and many more. My two favorite places in Moore are the Ice Skating Rink and Super Walmart. They’re both really large places!”

“It was very hard to read the letters because we saw the students were writing about how much they loved their town,” Sanya Jain said. “They were writing how happy they were in the school, and all the happy events they had. To know they went through that much and now they miss all that is really sad.”

Cardoso’s students, who all said they were profoundly affected by the Oklahoma tornado, spent the past few days replying to their new pen pals. The stack of heartfelt letters will be mailed Friday morning.

“We’ve been watching you on the news and I can say our class shed a tear at this traumatizing event,” Shama Shenoy wrote. “I can only imagine what you’ve been through, and I wish you the best for the future. I will be thinking of you always and I will never forget the disaster that plagued your area.”

A second wave of tornadoes — five touched down in and around Oklahoma City Friday, claiming 18 lives — forced another evacuation of the area, turning Interstates 35 and 40 into what officials called a parking lot. Dziedzic and her children were stuck in one of the miles-long traffic jams, a scene Cardoso watched unfold on CNN.

“Last Friday, I was wondering why Robin was taking longer than usual to respond to me,” she said. “Typically I hear from her within an hour of reaching out, but hours had passed. When she finally did reply, she told me she was headed out of town, her town was in a tornado emergency, and that she was leaving. She said the mood in her town was literally just fear. People were horrified.”

Cardoso broke into tears while watching CNN’s coverage. Even though Dziedzic “kept me posted the whole time,” Cardoso said she refused to change the channel until Dziedzic reported her family was safe and the threat passed.

“The way everything came together is just amazing,” Dziedzic said of her relationship with Cardoso and the Martin Luther King students. “The kids just feel the connection, like they have a new friend. I’m definitely going to encourage some pen pal action between the two groups. My kids need it, and I think her kids would love it.”

The next time Cardoso receives a large brown envelope with an Oklahoma postmark, expect the teacher and her students to open it immediately.