Random stranger helps Winnipeg teacher pay for books for her classroom

Stephanie Rempel, a grade three teacher at Harold Hatcher Elementary School in Transcona, says she is blown away by the kindness of a complete stranger who helped her pay for a stack of books for her classroom. (Submitted: Stephanie Rempel)

A Winnipeg elementary school teacher says she is blown away by the kindness of a complete stranger who helped her pay for a stack of books for her classroom.

Stephanie Rempel, a Grade 3 teacher at Harold Hatcher Elementary School in Transcona, was at McNally Robinson in the Grant Park Shopping Centre on Saturday picking out new books for her students. Rempel said she had filled her allocated school budget of $600 to spend on books in her classroom, but still had a stack of books she knew her students would enjoy.

Instead of putting them back on the shelf, Rempel intended to buy them with her own money.

She said as the cashier was scanning the books, a woman came up to her and asked if she was a teacher and if the books she was buying were for her students.

"Then she just proceeded to put money on the counter and said, 'These are for those books,' and started to walk away," Rempel said, recalling how the woman put a handful of bills on the counter.

"I'm thinking, 'What is going on? Is this for real?' And I'm kind of stumbling over my words, trying to just thank her."

Rempel said the woman left $80 for her to spend on the extra books.

"When I got to my car and put all the books in the back, I just kind of sat there trying to process what happened, I got quite emotional," Rempel said.

"We're all very excited and just blown away at this woman's kindness."

Angela Torgerson, the general manager of the McNally Robinson locations in Winnipeg, said it was a wonderful moment.

"We see teachers giving up their own time and spending their own money," she said. "We do what we can to support them, we offer them a discount, but to see something like this was just out of this world."

Torgerson said the woman is a customer at the store, and so she plans to send a thank you gift to the unnamed Good Samaritan.

"It was such a lovely, lovely moment," she said. "It's been a particularly disheartening couple of weeks, and to see an act of just generosity and pure kindness like that, it meant the world to my staff and we were floating on cloud nine all day afterwards."

Rempel said the students in her classroom will also be writing thank you notes to the stranger for her act of kindness. The notes will be passed along to Torgerson at McNally Robinson who will make sure they are delivered to the woman.

"We were all in actual tears. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing for our staff to see," Torgerson said.

"It really, really went a long way to restoring our faith in kind and good people."

-with files from CTV's Katherine Dow