New Palestine High School seniors, from left, Olivia Hasenkamp and Maddy Potter presented their project to fellow classmates on project pitch day.
By Kristy Deer | Daily Reporter
NEW PALESTINE — From collecting and purchasing personal care products for others to renovating a room at Hope Center Indy, serving others is a lesson being taught at New Palestine High School.
The Service Learning class is instructed by teacher Jeremy Large who has the junior and seniors work in groups to create a major service project to help the community.
Four students are doing two different projects for Hope Center Indy, which helps transforms the lives of women exiting sex trafficking. Other students are doing things like creating Resource Task Boxes for the district’s elementary school special needs classrooms. No matter what the project, the students came up with the ideas, will be raising funds for the projects and will be spreading the word about their work, all designed to benefit others.
Large spent the first few weeks of school identifying areas of need in the community that coincided with student areas of interest. He then had the students develop a plan and had them pitch the idea during a “Pitch Day” to the rest of the class, himself and the school’s administration team.
“They get lots of feedback and have started executing their plans” Large said. “My goal as their teacher is to provide students with opportunities to develop leadership, communication and strategic planning skills while helping our community.”
In addition to coming up with community service ideas, the students had to research their projects, come up with ways to fund-raise and are now in the process of executing the their plans.
Ethan Galster and Meagan Ramsey are working together to renovate a room at Hope Center Indy. Ethan has some construction and demo experience, so the two thought creating a room, a safe haven room for someone breaking away from human trafficking would be a great service project.
“We heard about a couple of seniors who did the project last year and since they’re working on several rooms there we really thought this would be a good project,” Ethan said.
Megan, who someday wants to be a nurse noted it was Ethan’s idea to create another room for people in need and she’s glad he came up with the idea. She wants to do all she can to help those who have suffered and said having a “safe room” will go a long way in doing that.
“We want it to be comforting so they don’t have any stress,” Megan said. “I want it to be a place they feel safe.”
Olivia Hasenkamp and Maddy Potter also liked the idea of doing something for Hope Center Indy, which is located about 10 minutes west of the high school on U.S. 52. They decided to create a “Hope Healing Hygiene” personal care product drive.
“We both have worked at the Hope Center before as volunteers and we both just have a big heart for the work being done there,” Maddy said. “We know they have a need for quality products because they get donations, but some of them are just not usable.”
They plan to raise money throughout the Southern Hancock school corporation via competitions at each of the district schools.
“We don’t have a goal just yet of how much we want to raise, but we just feel like any products we can donate will be helpful because we just want to show as much support to the residents as we can rather than put a dollar amount on anything,” Olivia said.
In addition to purchasing quality care products, they plan to work in the donation room at the Hope Center to help organize, coordinate and improve the room which houses all the donations.
“Our object for that room is just to organize it because they get big trash bags full of things that need to be organized,” Olivia said. “They need lots of help from people to sort that all out.”
All the students have the desire to make a difference and serve their community, they said, but noted, the service learning class isn’t for every student since it’s not the type of class they get dual credit from.
Still, it’s the type of class they feel is well worth taking.
“It just comes down to wanting to serve others and that comes through our faith,” Olivia said.
She and Maddy want to serve others not only through this project but always including in their professional careers, whatever that might be.
“It all comes down to our faith and wanting to show others love,” Maddy said. “This class allows us to do that in our life.”
The students are under no pressure to wrap up the project or finish things as many of the class community projects will evolve and may not have a close out date for the class which lasts two semesters.
The students noted the hardest part of the project is going to be raising the funds which they plan to do through Amazon donation links and through other donations from family, friends and fellow classmates.
One of the links, for Megan and Ethan is already up and running is at https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/38Z7S60BMC5AN?ref_=wl_share
