Featured Story
Community Service in the Upper School
From Director of Character Education, Kate Parker-Burgard
Our middle school service program is based primarily in the classroom, but as our students mature, our community service program grows with them. In the Upper School, we offer a variety of grade-wide and school-wide service activities, but we also look for the students to find their own service opportunities. In this way, the service program pushes them in their individual leadership development. Our Upper School students are in the midst of forming their adult identities. As they ask the questions “Who am I?”, “What do I care about?”, and “How can I make my community better?”, service opportunities provide a way to develop the habit of caring and the confidence of doing.
Each Upper School student is required to complete 20 hours of community service for each of their high school years as a graduation requirement (so a student starting in 9th grade will need 80 hours to graduate). There are many school-wide opportunities that help students get started with their service. In addition, all students find their own activities to complete the requirement. What counts toward the community service requirement? Any unpaid work for a nonprofit organization. Students may complete all of their hours with a single organization, or they may spread their hours among different ones. Generally, we encourage students to perform continuous work with a single organization so that they become more familiar with the organization and more competent with their contributions, but that is not required.
School-organized service activities are varied and run throughout the year. From student-organized bake sales to raise money for worthy causes to class-wide projects, our students have many different opportunities to learn about organizations and get involved in helping them. The annual class projects (9th grade toy drive, 10th grade Inspirica wrapping event, 11th grade Carver holiday party, and 12th grade Midnight Run) provide nice rally experiences for the grades, and school-wide activities such as the Special Olympics basketball tournament and the Inspirica Walk-a-Thon are important touch points for our students to connect with local organizations doing meaningful work. Additional projects this year, such as the 9th grade J-Term and the 11th grade oral history project, bring us deeper into service experiences.
Running throughout our entire community service program is the expectation that our students are becoming leaders who will move their communities forward in ethical and helpful ways. “Go forth to serve” isn’t just an instruction for our students upon their graduation; rather, it represents an orientation toward the world that we expect them to embody throughout their education at St. Luke’s.
St. Luke’s School is a secular (non-religious), private school in New Canaan, CT for grades 5 through 12 serving over 40 towns in Connecticut and New York. Our exceptional academics and diverse co-educational community foster students’ intellectual and ethical development and prepare them for top colleges. St. Luke’s Leading with Humanity curriculum builds the commitment to serve and the confidence to lead.
