by Head of Middle School Dan Lang
Two weeks ago I received an email from a Parker family that captured all that we hope for our students. In a moment of celebration and appreciation, I recalled that this is the most recent of many similar emails. Now in my twelfth year at Parker, our families have touched my heart more times than I can count. The email was brief and accompanied by the photo I have included with this article. Parker parent Reena Patel wrote to share her daughters’ community service project as follows, “Ayana and Maliya started Empowerbands in 2016 and founded this charity to donate not only positive message headbands they embroider and package for children with cancer, but donate proceeds as well. This picture is with the donation coordinator at Rady Children’s Hospital.”
The partnership we share with our Parker families helps to create the learning environment we aspire to at Parker. Each grade level at the Middle School has an age-appropriate theme: the Grade 6 team marinates our students in the theme of self-awareness. Armed with a year of focus on self, students progress to community awareness in Grade 7, and then global awareness in Grade 8. The expanding concentric circles of social-emotional development are tied to everything we do in our advisory programming.
Ayana and Maliya’s efforts provided a reason to celebrate, and the opportunity to ask two questions: What community service do our students do outside of Parker? And How does what our students do connect to what we do through our advisory programming? Here are just a few selections from the ninety responses I received. I could not be more honored to partner with these students and their families.
I am a Girl Scout who volunteers with different organizations such as dog rescues, the Ronald McDonald House, Rady Children’s Hospital, with a mission to make the world a better place. Going to the Food Bank in Grade 7 on Community Service day made me more aware of our theme last year, and my Girl Scout troop will hopefully go there to volunteer soon. I love to help people, and Parker, as well as my outside activities, helps this!
I do TVIA (teen volunteers in action) which focuses on community engagement and philanthropy. TVIA connects to all of our Middle School themes. You learn about yourself and help your community throughout the events. I have helped make and give out burritos to homeless, baked cookies for families with children in Rady children’s hospital and sorted clothes for other kids to name a few. In all of the events, I have realized that it is more to interact with others in your community and feel good about yourself than just community service.
I own and started a nonprofit that works with dogs. We are called pups with a purpose, and our mission is to protect and find homes for stray dogs in Mexico. I started the group in the Think Tinker Make class.
I volunteer at a Senior Center near my old school called Sunshine Care. I met many elderly people that I feel connected to since I have known them for many years. The community service I do relates to global awareness and community awareness since many of these elderly people come from all around the world and have many stories about war, famine, and hardship. Knowing these things makes me more aware of what happened in the past and what still happens today. These people have gone through so much and it is enlightening to spend time with them.
I volunteer with the San Diego Audubon Society to protect endangered coastal dunes and the California Least Terns. I have been a volunteer with them for nearly 5 years now and am one of their “Ternwatchers” who monitors the Terns. In advisory, we learn about the global community. I volunteer in the local community but because these birds are migratory and move from South America to North America they are truly global and my work has a global impact.
I volunteered at a Halloween Carnival for children and at the Elementary Institute of Science (EIS) at an engineering workshop focusing on STEM activities. When I volunteered at the workshop at EIS, it reminded me of Grade 7 Community Awareness Day. During the Community Awareness Day, I went to Empower Charter. Many of the children at Empower Charter have access to fewer opportunities than we do on a daily basis, just like some of the children at EIS. In advisory, we spoke about how it is not hard to improve someone’s life. Simple things, like spending time with kids, and volunteering at a workshop can make a huge difference to someone. That’s why I think it’s important to leave your piece of the world just a little bit better than when you found it, because if everybody focuses on doing that, then it will lead to monumental changes in our community, and eventually, the world.
After school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I volunteer at Bayside Community Center’s Resident Leadership Academy (RLA). We learn about different things that affect a community, and how we can be leaders to make changes and stand up against wrong. At the end of the training portion, we will choose a community service project to work on. This is one example of a past group’s project: a park didn’t have enough lighting, and it got really dark at night so families didn’t feel safe bringing their kids to the park. But since this was the only local park, it meant for most kids not being able to go to a park at all, leading to them not getting enough exercise. So the RLA went to the city and after over a year, they finally got better lighting at the park approved. The RLA relates to what we do in advisory because in both we learn about leadership and community, especially with community awareness being the Grade 7 theme.
