Seniors from Shawnee High School have put their dedicated day of service on hold.
Due to wet weather, the day was rescheduled for May 2. Several senior projects were slated to take place outdoors, which caused the cancelation. The day of service was supposed to kick off last Friday.
The high school, along with the other schools in the Lenape Regional High School District, will send a total of 1,800 students out into their local, sending communities to do good during a senior day of service.
The district’s senior day of service is part of a service-learning project funded by a grant from the New Jersey Learn and Serve America Program.
In the classroom, students have been exposed to an interdisciplinary approach to service learning that includes topics in business, English, social studies and technology.
Now, on May 2, it’s Shawnee students’ turn to get out there to show what they’ve learned about community service, they’ll actually do some hands on service work that will touch thousands of lives.
LRHSD Assessment, Accountability and Planning Coordinator Chris Heilig said, in total, district students will head out to almost 100 different sites to do volunteer work for one day.
Community service sites include daycares, preschools, and Medford K-8 schools. Students will also head out to Medford parks, the police and fire departments, assisted living and senior citizen retirement communities, rehabilitation centers, and food banks, among other places, to help out.
While out in the community, students will complete a range of services including helping teachers at sending schools with landscaping cleanup, painting, conducting social activities and leading book talks. Activities at the municipal facilities will include washing municipal vehicles, painting, planting flowers and general cleanup. They’ll also coordinate crafts and activities for patients at rehabilitation centers.
A little further beyond Medford, students will travel to Pennsauken to organize and package orders for the underprivileged at the South Jersey Food Bank
Heilig said students were able to choose which site they wanted to volunteer at via a Web site that allowed them to select from a list.
Some seniors will stay at school for the day, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be doing their share of community service. Senior members of Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) will remain at school to educate sophomore students about teen safety and driving as part of a Project Ignition grant sponsored by State Farm Insurance.
Both the Learn and Serve America and the Project Ignition grants promote service learning and connect curriculum with volunteer service activities.
Heilig said students have been doing projects connected with the senior day of service all year in various curriculum areas, including business class where they worked on a marketing and promotional campaign that included flyers and videos to promote the senior day of service. In English, students wrote letters introducing themselves to the sites they plan to visit. After the day of service, Heilig said, students will complete reflective writing assignments in their world cultures classes.
“There were a number of preliminary activities and then after the day of service there will be a number of activities for reflection and discussion related to service learning,” Heilig said.
The senior day of service is integral to LRHSD’s long-range strategic plan, which has been developed to fulfill the district mission of developing physically and emotionally healthy students. This part of the plan is designed to instill a civic responsibility and the desire to serve the community in LRHSD students.
Stay tuned after May 2 for photos and video of Shawnee seniors in action.
