One Mineola High School program is using some of the Mineola school district’s technology to help get students excited about community service, its mission for more than 30 years.
“Students do it not for a resume-builder, not for something that they have to do, but because they genuinely love it and because we provide them with the opportunities,” said Eileen Burke, co-director of the school’s Falk Sysak Student Service Center, told the Mineola School Board at its Jan. 7 meeting.
Founded in 1983 and named for a former Mineola teacher and school board member, the Student Service Center aims to get Mineola High School students involved with yearly, monthly and weekly local volunteer efforts.
Funded through partnerships with local and national non-profit groups, the center is one vehicle for encouraging students to “contribute positively through a global society,” part of the school district’s mission statement, Burke said.
It’s another way for students to get connected with community service in addition to the school’s traditional service clubs and service-learning programs, Burke said.
“We focus on providing a variety of opportunities for students to be active and engaged in helping others,” Mineola High School teacher Nancy Regan told the board.
Over the course of a given school year, students visit senior citizens and nursing home patients, serve dinners at Long Island’s Ronald McDonald House, tutor younger district students and participate in several other community service efforts.
Some of the volunteer programs are coordinated through the Student Service Center’s funders, such as Gingerbread University, an annual event sponsored by the Nassau County Bar Association’s We Care Fund.
Other partners include the Floral Park-based Walter Kaner Children’s Foundation, Youth Service America and the charitable arm of Sodexo, a food-service company.
Mineola students complete thousands of service hours each year, Burke said; 2015’s graduating class netted 3,490 hours.
The Student Service Center is working to get eighth-graders involved with a program called Eight Ways to Serve, which offers eight monthly service projects throughout the school year,” Regan said.
The school is also using Kid OYO, an online platform the district implemented this year, to rewarding service milestones with digital badges, assistant principal Amy Trojanowski said, adding that she’s already had to create a badge for a student who’s done 50 service hours.
Mineola senior Pratibha Anand said volunteering with the Student Service Center has helped her become more confident, she said, and strengthened her connection with the community where she lives.
“Student Service Center helped me make friends, create social skills that I didn’t have before, and just overall, realize what my community is like and what needs my community has, and how I can help to give back to my community as much as it’s given back to me,” Anand said.
Mineola school Superintendent Michael Nagler said he sees the Student Service Center’s effects in Mineola alumni who go into service programs such as the Peace Corps and Teach for America.
The testimony the board heard from Anand and other students indicates the center is fulfilling its part of the mission, school board President Christine Napolitano said.
“It makes me very proud to know that we’re not only educating you in books and music and art but in humanity, and knowing that we’re all part of this great big world,” she said.
