Service-Learning Fuels Reinvestment in New Castle Schools and Community

New Castle School District in New Castle, Pennsylvania educates just over 3,200 students and covers the city and surrounding townships, which itself is only a fraction of its former size. Located not far from Pittsburgh and once a booming steel town, it shrank dramatically with the collapse of the steel industry, now just over a third of its peak population of 60,000. There are few employment opportunities outside the hospital system and the school system. About 70 percent of New Castle’s students are in the free or reduced lunch program. One teacher said, “There used to be both an uptown and a downtown shopping area. There were stores everywhere. Now we have more parking lots and bars than anything else downtown.”

Given the area’s economic pressures and budget cuts, it is all the school administration can do to meet basic expenses and try to cut waste. It seems natural, then, that teachers would be the ones to discover and latch onto service-learning as a method to improve their schools. New Castle was one of the original eleven Service-Learning Centers in the state of Pennsylvania.

Their experience began in the 2001-2002 school year, under one of the original Learn and Serve America grants from the federal government. The mission that evolved from this early work was to help district students become civic-minded, responsible people. This focus closely resembles Guilford County School’s Character Development initiative, but in New Castle, the ongoing work has been sparked primarily by teachers who have been inspired by the successes of service-learning elsewhere. They hear about much of this work at the National Service-Learning Conference, convened each year by NYLC

Franny Joseph’s interest in service-learning was ignited during her very first year of teaching by a professor from Slippery Rock University, who was part of a grassroots effort to push service-learning across Pennsylvania. The professor approached Joseph about launching it in her district. “It was part of the ICARE model,” she recalls. “The acronym stood for Investigation, Collaboration, Action, Reflection, Excitement.” This led to a turning point almost before Joseph’s career had begun. “I was teaching my first class, nine kids, eleventh and twelfth grades, all of them at-risk. We were working on character development and skills like how to make phone calls, write letters, and so on.”

In this first effort, the service element involved help for the nearby town of Millvale, which was engaged in major flood reclamation. The students learned how to waterproof cellars and volunteered to help a 90-year-old woman whose cellar had been damaged by flood waters. Joseph says, “The ceiling was very low, and these kids spent nine hours down there, bent over, working hard to seal that cellar. What they did wasn’t directly connected to the curriculum, but it gave them a taste of service.”

That taste whetted the appetites of both teacher and students. Joseph now has ongoing projects, including one with the Central Blood Bank, for which the students run blood drives four times a year. Each year, the blood bank donates funds to the school that reflect how many blood donations the students have brought in. The money can be used only for student scholarships, and each year an essay competition determines which students will receive scholarship help. Over five years, Joseph’s students have raised $13,000 through blood drives. This project has a stronger curricular link, with a biology teacher offering some instruction in forensics, including blood typing and DNA testing.

Joseph is working on infusing service-learning more fully within the academic curriculum. As part of this initiative, each student now needs a new project each semester, and it must be cross-curricular, designed to extend and draw upon their studies in a variety of subjects. It must also link tightly to state education standards, which means each project must soon align with Common Core State Standards.

Joseph says, “All projects are student-driven. They raise the students’ self-esteem and also their sense of school pride,” when they can apply their academic competence. “In an area where there are plenty of drug dealers looking to recruit these kids,” says Joseph, “it’s important to show them that they, their town, and their school are worth much more than that. Now they see they do have good things to offer.” She confirms, however, that up to this point the district’s service-learning efforts are exclusively bottom-up. “The administration supports us, but there’s no money to back up their support. I know some of the big districts have full-time service-learning coordinators. Well, I’m the coordinator here, but I teach six classes a day and still have to apply for grants, raise funds to go to the conferences, and keep track of the service-learning work.”

Driver education teacher Donna Campbell, who also teaches health and nutrition, got started with service-learning through Joseph. Following the National Service-Learning Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2007, Campbell decided to get her students involved in Project Ignition right away. Their first effort, in which students staged a mock car crash in front of their schools just before prom, was named among the top 25 in the country at the next National Service-Learning Conference, in Minneapolis in 2008. The following year in Nashville, her students’ work won “Best of the Best.”

"It grows every year,” Campbell says. “It even brings in outside organizations. A local radio station was so impressed with our project that they asked six basketball players — well-known, popular kids — to record PSAs for automobile safety. This is ongoing.”

In New Castle, service-learning is not currently supported by sustained, focused professional development or an overall district vision. It relies instead on in-service supports and the enthusiasm of individual teachers and students. Joseph and Campbell are working with the administration to find creative ways of making service-learning a key district effort, and they are particularly keen for professional development that will help the district make strong connections to the academic curriculum.

New Castle Superintendent George Gabriel and the director of curriculum and instruction Terence Meehan are supportive and intrigued by the possibility of using service-learning as a strategy to engage students in their learning and their school—thus increasing a reciprocal community investment in the schools. They see service-learning as a means of reinvesting in a struggling town by connecting academic achievement to the economic engine of the community. One particularly compelling idea noted by elementary school principal Debra DeBlasio is to expand the current program where high school students read to pre-K-3 students. It is an effective way of engaging teens in efforts to narrow growing achievement gaps in the district, and fits in well with district priorities on early childhood and primary education efforts as a key strategy for district academic improvement.