How My Students Feel the Impact of Learn and Serve America Cuts
Last April, four students excitedly sat in a hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia and talked about their plans for our school’s service-learning program. They had just spent three days at the National Service-Learning Conference and were energized by the creative projects, great ideas, and enthusiasm of so many people, especially youth, who were engaged in helping to change the world through service-learning. Their enthusiasm was contagious and as we drove back to Missouri, I couldn’t wait to see their ideas become action.
That’s one of the amazing parts of using service-learning as a teaching methodology: the enthusiasm and creativity of my students to use their knowledge and skills to help others in our community. However, our enthusiasm was dampened last spring when we learned that the Learn and Serve America program had been cut from the federal budget. Thankfully, we did receive a small amount of leftover funds this fall.
To be honest, the hardest part of losing national funding has been telling my students For them, it was one more negative decision in an already dreary economic climate. They had a hard time understanding why a program that benefited over one million students and countless communities was losing funding. They began to rethink how they could carry out their ideas without the funding we had previously received.
At our school the biggest negative impact has been the number of students we can get involved in direct action due to loss of transportation. The students have great ideas and we have wonderful community partners but we need funds to help get our students out in the community. Another negative impact has been the lack of opportunities for students to network with other students through regional and state opportunities. Losing our state supervisor for service-learning at Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will hurt my students as we lose a person who not only provided grants, but also provided training, support, and many opportunities for youth voice in Missouri’s service-learning program.
Our school is built on a culture of service and we will keep working to sustain our service-learning program. Our school gives us a small budget for which we are very grateful. We have community partners who help whenever they can, and we have gotten creative in looking for ways to solve funding issues. Our students will continue to be engaged in the community; it is just going to take a lot more time and effort to figure out how to do it.
We are always looking for new ideas and would love to hear what others are doing to help students have these valuable experiences.
Beth Nickle is a teacher at the Bailey Alternative High School in Springfield, Missouri and was awarded Springfield Public School Teacher of the Year in 2008. She has used service-learning with her students since the early 1990s, and is Missouri's South Central Regional Coordinator for Service-Learning. You can read a history of the budget cuts to the Learn and Serve program at http://www.saveservice.org/pages/legislative-update/.
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