I am frequently asked what our students do in regards to service learning in the Upper School, and my most common answer is “a lot of different things!” I can elaborate on a few of the options here. 

 

Upper School service coordinator Lisa Dean has been making the rounds to junior advisories and also presented at the most recent junior class parent meeting. Her topic is the Community Impact Project (CIP) that all seniors complete. With three advisors (Lisa Dean, Paul Kim and David Colodny) to assist them, each senior proposes a plan for a meaningful service project and may do so in pairs of teams of three. The parameters for the CIP are quite open. A student must identify a need in the community and take some action to remedy that need. 

 

The great opportunity presented here is that students have the chance to take a deep dive into an area of interest and passion. For many students, they are simply continuing a connection to a service agency they have already been involved with; for others, it provides the impetus to explore an area that they may not have been able to do before. 

 

You might notice that part of the project is NOT logging a certain number of hours. Service learning has transformed over the past decade or so. Best practice no longer entails students tracking hours on a spreadsheet, or schools going to agencies en masse on a day of their choosing. Rather, volunteers coordinate and partner with the agencies in which they have interest, find out what those agencies need, and meet that need in the best way possible on the agency’s terms. This is a shift in attitude as much as action. The old notion of “noblesse oblige” may have come from a decent place, but it does not fully recognize the humanity of the communities one wishes to serve. Students engaged in meaningful service are working on behalf of and in partnership with the people or agencies, meeting actual needs, not assumed ones.

 

Another wonderful component of CA’s service program is our on-campus service day. Advisory groups of sophomores spend half a day with the food service crew and half a day with the operations staff assisting with the daily tasks that those departments of the school perform. This day of service in-house builds empathy and appreciation for the many folks who work “behind the scenes” to make sure our students are well fed and our campus is looking great.

 

We also have a plethora of service-based clubs in the Upper School, anchored by our longstanding Students HOPE group which plans and carries out a major community event every December. Other clubs with a service focus include AfricAid, Children’s Hospital, Road To Hope, Horizons Club and Amnesty International. All of those are student-led and whatever they can accomplish is because of their efforts, with very little oversight from the adult sponsors. We believe strongly that anything in the broad category of service learning is much better for students when it reflects their initiatives and interests.

 

That said, we also want to expose them to multiple opportunities, some of which they may not know about. So faculty offer voluntary excursions throughout the course of the year, either on a school day or on a Saturday, just as I did last week when I took a group of twelve freshmen to the Mango House in Aurora. That grassroots agency serves the multiple needs of recent refugees who have been re-located in Denver. (Right now their greatest numbers come from the Congo, Somalia, Bhutan and Iraq.) Students were able to assist with many different tasks while there and also interacted with some refugee children in the child care center.  We hope to offer one more trip out to this destination before the end of the year.