Small School Models Community Service on a Grand Scale
By Katie Amodei
In the heart of the University District, there’s a small school where students do big deeds. Each Wednesday, Puget Sound Community School – with 28 students ages 10 to 18 – holds a day of community service where students are encouraged to pick the projects they want to do to help the community.
Consistent with the school’s philosophy of student-directed learning, students choose volunteer opportunities that appeal to them, but are not required to participate. “Once you make it mandatory, it’s no longer really service,” comments Andy Smallman, director of the school. If students choose not to participate, the school structure allows them to write up an independent study project instead.
Most weeks, a majority of students do participate in the community service day. This academic year alone, they have racked up more than 2,000 hours of volunteer work on projects ranging from reading to kids to planting native trees along the Interstate 90 corridor.
The popular tree-planting project spanned the months of November and December. The school partnered with the Mountains to Sound Greenway project in Lake Sammamish State Park where environmentalists taught them how to remove invasive nonnative plants and plant hundreds of native plants and trees. In April, students completed a similar 250-service-hours project to remove invasive plants at Ravenna Park in Seattle.
The students came up with the idea of building a hope chest out of donated wood to give to an 18-year-old who is graduating from the foster care system. In collaboration with senior citizens from Ida Culver House, the students made or collected donated items to fill the chest with things a young adult needs when he gets his own apartment. They donated the chest to Treehouse, an organization that supports foster children.
Other projects have included holding a car wash and a vegan bake sale to raise $3,200 for victims of Hurricane Katrina and harvesting more than 100 pounds of beans, which would have rotted on the vine, to give to local food banks. In the spring, students have been directing their own projects, from gardening and house repairs for people in the school community, to promoting local businesses or working in a daycare center.
Sometimes it’s the human contact that enriches the students’ experience. On Pearl Harbor Day, they visited a retirement village to do activities with the residents and to interview some of the retirees. There, they met a Japanese-American woman whose father had been interned during the war, as well as a German woman who told her story of the war. “They learned from that experience so much more than I as a teacher could ever teach from a history book,” says Smallman.
After each volunteer day, the students gather as a group to reflect on what they have accomplished and learned.
“My favorite service project was one we did with preschools in the area,” says Elaine Jenkins, a senior in her third year at the school. “I’m really interested in early childhood education because you feel like you immediately have an impact and make a difference when you interact with kids. I’m actually continuing it through an independent study.”
Puget Sound Community School is a private school with no religious affiliation located in the University Heights Center for the Community, 5031 University Way N.E. in Seattle. For more information, call 206-324-4350 or visit www.pscs.org.
