GOAL Students Learn and Serve

Environment of your World

Curriculum Strands:

Conservation

• Bird Conservation
• Invasive Species 
• Alternative Energy 
• Horticulture 
• Green Practices 
• Include design challenges in all substrands 
• Community Service: Adopt-a-Highway, Volunteering at gardens, presentations on being green, awareness on saving energy at home and recognizing hazardous waste and waste disposal methods, improvement projects, bird counts, recycling

Homelessness

Curriculum Strands:

On Your Own

• Real-life problem solving
• Finding a Job
• Job behavior
• Planning for future
• 18 is not the magic number
• Cost of independent living
• Planning a good transition

Personal Finance – Getting Money

• Finding deals
• Scams – confirming good deals
• Financing
• Banking online how-to; debit cards

Personal Finance – Keeping Money

• Banking fees
• Money management (how much in savings)
• Budgeting
• Luxury Item purchases (rent to own) (Suze Orman)
• Wants vs. needs
• Credit cards

Housing and Society

• Leases, Land contracts
• Who is homeless?
• What is homelessness?
• Cycle of poverty
• Culture of poverty – recognizing it and breaking it
• Community Service: Money management seminars with homey feel, volunteering at homeless shelter, awareness activity – tent city, resource list of housing and food banks, public service announcements, student newspaper with resources, website with links for resources and request for help

Cheri and I are at the February follow-up meeting of the grantees for the Learn and Serve grant.  Right now we are going around the room and saying what needs we Developmental grantees have and seeing what the Model grantees (the experienced folks) can offer us.  While they are talking, I’m getting too excited to just sit, so I have to type these ideas before I lose them!

1.  It is important to write news articles about all our service learning work, so it is important to create lessons in the curriculum about communication – communicating our needs, communicating our successes, communicating our positions.  This will then integrate well into all English classes, but especially into Journalism, etc.

2.  Madison Comprehensive HS (Deb Pickens is here) is partnering with the Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society to help with the preservation of the building.  She is wanting to increase the number of non-career/tech teachers into the project.  History teachers would be a natural.  I wonder if we could collaborate on some online curriculum with Rick Jones leading the way?

3.  I mentioned that the one area that we could use some help in was in establishing, developing and strengthening community partnerships.  Kimberly Bash of Hancock County ESC mentioned that is an area where they could help.  Cheri started looking on the Internet for additional partners and found that Mansfield has an Altrusa group.  She also found Leadership Unlimited (leadershipunlimited.com) in Mansfield which may be able to help us with PD for teachers, etc.

4.  I think we need a presentation from a community service organization for our final Think Tank celebration.  Altrusa Mansfield might be appropriate.

5.  Kristi Scott of Ripley High School has lots of experience in establishing, administering and raising funds for scholarships.  She also has lots of video production equipment from Ripley’s 21st century grant, FYI.

Teen Pregnancy and Parenting

Curriculum Strands:

Sociology of Teen Pregnancy and Parenting

• Culture of poverty, cycles of ….behavior
• History of teen pregnancy – why it’s changed
• Media impact on teen pregnancy and parenting
• Community Service:  Website development; Walk-a-thon for awareness

• How to have a conversation with your boyfriend/girlfrien
• Teen dating violence
• Abuse (from parents, boyfriend, others) – dealing with it, what is it?
• Self-esteem – valuing yourself
• Ways out of a bad homelife (pregnancy is not the answer)
• Relationships instruction
• Divorce
• Live-in boyfriends (with mom)
• Family situations including substance abuse
• Mental well being
• Community Service:  Website development; Walk-a-thon for awareness; Support groups

Human Sexuality

• Birth control – how to get, education about
• STD’s – testing
• Abstinence support
• 1st sexual experience
• Pregnancy and postnatal health
• Substance use and pregnancy
• Rape, date-rape, acquaintance rape
• Community Service:  Website development; Walk-a-thon for awareness; Peer Talk Board

Parenting

• Breastfeeding
• Baby’s health – vaccines, development, shaken baby
• Safety – babyproofing, car seats, toys
• General parenting issues
• Community Service:  Website development; Walk-a-thon for awareness; Childcare for Job Searches; Diaper Pantry; Knitting instruction; Walking tour of support organizations; Video blog of ThinkitOver Parenting; Child Care during GRADS meetings

Social Support for Teens

• Finding free things
• Social services support
• Community Service:  Website development; Walk-a-thon for awareness; Walking tour of support organizations; Child care during GRADS meetings; Child care for job searches

The steering committee gathered all of the information that we have collected thus far and pulled them together into the three topics for the project.  We decided to organize the project into a three-year progression.  The first year we would implement the Teen Pregnancy and Parenting topic with several community service projects.  The second year we would continue to develop and expand that first topic and implement the Environment topic with its own community service projects.  The third year we would add the Homelessness topic while we continue to expand the first two topics.

These are the topic lists we created:

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At this meeting, we looked at our overarching theme of “Taking care of ourselves, taking care of others” and the three topics that we are interested in, Teen Pregnancy and Parenting, Homelessness, and the Environment and we brainstormed potential community service projects that would fit in these topics.  The group came up with so many, we had to write on the back of our posters as well!

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We welcomed two new members to the steering committee.  Vicki Glorioso, GOAL Academic Coach, and Chris M, GOAL student, joined the team.  

This steering committee meeting was a tough one in a lot of ways.  We had lots of ideas and we wanted to try to clump as many of them together as we could into a cohesive theme for our service learning project. At first it seemed a bit daunting, but we did pretty well.  We were able to pull most of the ideas into three main topics:  Teen Pregnancy and Parenting, Homelessness (including Serial Renting and Couch Surfing), and The Environment.  Our notes are pictured here:

Later it became clear that all of these topics fit very well under an “umbrella” theme:  ”Taking Care of Ourselves and Taking Care of Others.”  This is a pretty nice theme that will carry us through multiple years and lots of different service projects as our program evolves.

The rest of this meeting was spent divvying up the tasks for the next meeting like so:

The second Think Tank will be held on November 20th to present our theme and topics and to brainstorm service projects to go with these topics.

Students, teachers, administrators and community members came together to begin planning GOAL’s service learning program.  The first step that we worked on tonight was determining what community needs and issues we all felt strongly about.  

It was great how everyone pitched in to make the evening a success.  JOG students from Delaware County manned a reception desk where people signed in and the JOG teachers brought in a spaghetti dinner.

Mrs. Chervenak facilitated the meeting, starting with an icebreaker and continuing with a short presentation about the basics of service learning.

We carb’ed up with spaghetti and then used the energy to fuel a brainstorming session generating issues important to us or needs we saw in the community.

The evening was fun and we created quite a long list of issues that we could incorporate into our service learning program.

• Laura Chervenak, Director of GOAL
• Cheri Nolting, Assistant Director of GOAL
• Kevin Rickly, 9-12 Assistant Director of GOAL
• Cara Seibel, GOAL Academic Coach
• Fred Fairchild, GOAL Academic Coach
• Shannon Wellin, GOAL JOG Teacher
• Suzi Lyle, GOAL JOG Teacher
• Tish Jenkins, JOG Regional Director
• Chris Pigman, MOESC Director of Education

In June, I received an email from Charlotte Jones-Ward from the Ohio Department of Education asking for more information about a grant application I submitted this spring.  This was a good sign – they were THINKING about giving us money.  So I did my best to encourage Charlotte to trust us with the funds by telling her all the good things we will be doing with it.

And lo and behold, I received the email saying that we were awarded the grant!  This is a small, developmental grant of $3000 to spend a year developing a service learning program for GOAL.  

We are going to start meeting in August to discuss the process that we are going to take to develop the program.  According to the grant, then, we will have a community “Think Tank” meeting where we will invite parents, students, staff and community members to let us know what they think are the community needs.

This is pretty exciting!