Even outfitted with a puffy down jacket and equipped with a heavy-duty snow blower, winters in Syracuse are brutal. Each year 1,000 refugees arrive in Central New York from countries like Bhutan and Republic of the Congo, where flip-flops are year-round footwear and snow is not in the forecast. The students at Expeditionary Learning Middle School are collecting boots for Hopeprint, a local non-profit organization that helps to facilitate these refugees’ transition to the United States. Service learning is a component to the multi-disciplinary learning experience at ELMS.
ELMS is a unique learning environment where students are divided into multi-aged, single-gender CREWS, with a faculty member as their leader.
“The CREW is centered around experiential learning, fitness, literacy, numeracy and service learning,” said Mary Beth Murray, CREW Coordinator and AVID teacher. “It is the foundation of how our whole building runs.”
Since 2008, service learning has been an integrated part of the learning philosophy. In the past, each CREW would select its own project and participate in service, but due to lack of funding, the faculty decided to collaborate on one area that would involve everyone participating in the same activity said Mark Loftus, CREW leader and resource teacher.
