Many students volunteer their time for various community service opportunities offered throughout the year by club leaders, individual students and faculty. Now, with a new project requiring student participation, the school administration has demonstrated its intention to make service a more core component of community life.
The initiative was first announced to students in emails from their class deans on the last day of winter break. An additional announcement made during Community Meeting on Wednesday, January 8, reiterated details regarding each grade’s responsibilities for Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, when most of the service projects would commence.
“I have talked about MLK weekend for a long time because of the legacy of Dr. King. And my belief [is] that he really believed in the idea of community and connection and character, and lifting while you climb […] and that there were ways for people to connect, even those people who didn’t necessarily agree about different stuff,” Director of External Programs Mr. Truslow said when asked about the reason behind choosing MLK weekend for this project. “There’s a way for a community to come together, to support one another, even in the face of those kinds of disagreements, right? So it’s a natural place to think about community and service, in my opinion,” he said.
MLK weekend falls on a No-Class Saturday and is a stretch of three free days, which also factored into the decision.
Projects differ for each grade. Sophomores and juniors will select their top three choices from a list of service opportunities. They have the option of participating on either Saturday or Monday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day). Activities include running music or sports clinics, volunteering at local retirement home Meadow Lakes and helping at local thrift store RISE. Club leaders can propose an activity for their club to facilitate if they so choose.
Freshmen will work at the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) on Saturday, January 17. Seniors have started leading donation drive efforts that will continue throughout next week; sophomores and juniors volunteering at places like RISE will transport the donations as part of their service activity.
“This is a real, sort of, desert time,” Mr. Truslow observed. Mr. Truslow, who has overseen most community and service initiatives at Peddie for over 15 years, explained that people tend to donate less once the holiday season is over, but families in need continue to be in need, which makes donation drives especially important at this time of year.
According to Mr. Truslow, the idea to structure community service in this way has been under discussion for a while. This year, community service became a program officially overseen by the Student Life Office; instead of working alone, Mr. Truslow now coordinates and collaborates with Dean Brown and the Student Life team to find ways to make service “a more intentional part of our life here at the school.”
“There’s no question in my mind that this is something that will be a springboard to larger initiatives over the course of the next number of years,” Mr. Truslow said. He noted that this year was a transitional one for implementing this approach to community service, and he hopes that the MLK weekend initiative will become a school tradition. His larger vision includes organizing grade-wide projects each year and making community service more of an obligation completed by students as a part of their overall curriculum.
“That whole idea of ‘lift while you climb’ isn’t unique to Peddie, or to students, it’s something that I think we should live as . . . global citizen[s], right?” Mr. Truslow remarked. “We’re working together to create this […] as a stepping stone to having our community be more involved and be more helpful and be more connected to our local community,” he said.
