"The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens." —Alexis de Tocqueville

Purpose of Community Service

The purpose of the Community Service Program is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for active participation in the community. Our goal is to involve every student at Roland Park Country School in a service project that is appropriate to her age and maturity. By the time she graduates, it is our hope that each student will have a basic understanding of the problems, tasks and rewards related to the care and support of the community in which she lives. Each student will have had the opportunity to see that their efforts, small as they might seem, can make a difference. Every student is required to devote a minimum of sixty hours to community service during her four years of Upper School. Many students far surpass this minimum.

Goals of Community Service

• To enhance the students' understanding of and commitment to the larger community
• To integrate the world of ideas and academic pursuits with everyday life
• To give students the opportunity to offer their skills and talents to the Baltimore community and to the School community
• To nurture the habits of community service and volunteerism
• To develop personal qualities such as confidence, self-reliance, maturity, and responsibility
• To provide an opportunity for students to discover and develop their strengths that may not be available in academics, athletics, or the arts
• To acquaint students with possible career opportunities

Scope

Each grade will have a service project which members of the class will support during the School year.

Lower School
Students and parents in grades K through Five give their support to a variety of selected projects each year. The projects vary according to the need and the interests of the children. The following are just some of the projects Lower School students participated in this past school year: Kindergarten, Pre-First, and First Grade students made 86 wonderful, warm fleece blankets for the children at the Center for Infant Study at the University of Maryland; Second and Third Grade students sang their holiday songs for the residents of Roland Park Place. As well, they collected a great number of supplies and good for the soldiers in Iraq and sent them along with Buffy, the 3G mascot. The Fourth and Fifth Graders put together fitness packages for children who are living in shelters through Helping Hands and Paul’s Place. They led the Lower School in raising over $2500 for the tsunami relief efforts.

Middle School
Sixth graders are engaged in a partnership with Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. Every few months, students get together with the kindergarten class and participate with them in reading, storytelling and writing activities. The seventh grade does landscaping (planting and mulching) at Cylburn Arboretum and also works with Garden Harvest. Eighth graders partner with kindergarten students at Barclay Elementary School, making periodic visits to read and play with these younger students. Throughout the year Middle School students contribute to fundraising drives and material drives; for example, the African American Awareness Club collected books for a city middle school which lacked a school library, and the whole middle school participated in fundraising for tsunami relief through a variety of projects.

Upper School
As a requirement for graduation, each student is expected to complete at least sixty hours of community service—forty hours must be completed at one site and the remaining 20 hours can be served at the same site or other sites. Her project can be selected from our community service resources list or can be her own idea, subject to approval by the Upper School Community Service Coordinator for individual projects. The range of organizations has been very broad, including virtually every hospital, soup kitchen, nursing home and museum in the area, as well as recycling centers, recreational centers, literacy programs and other agencies serving special needs.

Community Service Resources

Each grade is expected to complete at least one-class project per year, designed by the class under the guidance of its elected community service representatives to the School Government Association and the Class Community Service Coordinator. Recent and past class projects have included helping at Special Olympics, singing at a nursing home, cleaning up local parks, raising money through major walk-a-thons, and tutoring at Pimlico Elementary and Furman L. Templeton Elementary Schools.

Additionally, seniors may choose a community service internship as their Senior Project; however, hours accumulated during the Senior Project are not considered as the community service requirement, and are not added to the seniors’ total hours.

Projects for the entire Upper School are developed both seasonally and on an ad-hoc basis. For example, at Thanksgiving the students have made turkey sandwiches in assembly line fashion, sending in addition the fixings for turkey soup (bags of potatoes, carrots and celery with the turkeys). Christmas/Hanukkah projects vary; adopting a family for the holiday, providing wrapped gifts for each member of the family and food for three full meals on that day. Examples of ad-hoc projects or drives include helping natural disaster and war victims with donations of food, clothing and money (i.e. Tsunami in Southeast Asia Hurricane Andrew, the Kosovo Crisis).

Contact

The Upper School Community Service Coordinator is Ana Oberdieck. Ms. Oberdieck's office is on the second floor of the Ward House (College Counseling Office). She can be reached at oberdiecka@rpcs.org or extension 3107.