Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) students complete a community service-based project during their junior year. In order to present their ideas to the class, students must conduct research and write an essay.
“The project is a part of the AVID curriculum that [junior AVID teacher Brad Raine] has for us junior year, so we’re going through it right now and are on the research project for service learning,” junior Brady Green said.
Green and junior Gabe Kohls take a different approach than their classmates including the classroom environment in their project’s central idea. Other groups in their class have ideas like drives and community pick-up.
“It seemed like it was simple for service-learning to incorporate how you can learn from it,” Kohls said.
The two juniors work together to show the benefits of community service in a high school environment.
“As we got further in, we realized that there are a lot more benefits to students than we thought,” Kohls said.
The two propose the idea of a community service-based class within the high school that includes gardening, charity, and common life skills. The hypothetical class would give students the opportunity to sell and donate their goods in order to benefit the community.
In order to write the essay portion of the project, each group or pair of partners needs six sources of information to support their idea.
“We are using students, staff, multiple websites and genres of music as our sources,” Green said.
The two spent an ACE period visiting classes in order to garner support for their idea from their peers. They also have the ambition to make their idea of a service-learning based class a reality for them and their peers.
