By Eileen Dachnowicz
Missouri’s Brentwood Middle School (grades 6–8) is striving to take community service to another level, according to Dr. Julie Sperry, its principal. Students are now in the driver’s seat, first identifying community needs and then collaborating on a plan to address them, using skills that reinforce what they learn in the classroom. By including demonstration and reflection, Brentwood now holds the blueprint for converting service into true “learning.”
“An amazing experience” is how Brentwood students describe a project that they tried in this service learning mode. In a collaborative venture, they constructed a garden path for Covenant House, a shelter for homeless and at-risk teens. They researched the square footage and cost of materials in math class and then purchased the materials and built the actual path. Sperry adds that it is students who are “helping us create meaningful service ‘learning.’”
Brentwood Middle School students are not the only ones making curricular connections to service. For example, the little ones at South Carolina’s Berkeley Elementary School (grades preK–2) participate in the Kids Who Care (KWC) ecology program, and have initiated projects such as recycling water bottles to create story characters and reusing shopping bags to stuff bean bag chairs. Budding biologists at Wisconsin’s Lake Bluff School (grades preK–6) combined a field trip with actual service: Students divided their time between studying organisms and cleaning up the beach.
In short, these three schools are joined by the other 22 NSOC for 2012 in showing the nation how students use service learning as an ideal way to learn empathy and good citizenship while practicing problem solving, organizational skills, and collaborative planning.
Read more in the 2012 NSOC magazine: “Schools of Character.”
Learn more about the 2012 NSOC by visiting their school profiles.
