Community Service
We recognize that children and adults at St. Patrick’s are blessed with a bounty of talents, gifts, and opportunities. The fullest expression of gratitude for these blessings is found not just as each child and adult strives for individual excellence and responsibility, but also as each individual learns to give back by serving others and striving to become a constructive part of building a better world. Service opportunities provide a vital part of the curriculum, teaching students to move from their own world into the larger world to explore how important, fulfilling, and life-giving the experience of helping others can be. While these opportunities are numerous and varied, they all serve one purpose: To inspire a spirit of compassion and understanding, not only of oneself, but of those we serve.
One lasting image that captures the importance of service activity at St. Patrick’s is the arrival at school of our youngest students, the three- and four-year-old Nursery and PK children, each clutching a vegetable in his/her hands on the one day each month they will scrub and chop the items to make soup that older students and their parents will serve to homeless people that evening. Even with children of such tender ages, St. Patrick’s strives to find a way to have them understand a social issue in hopes that both their understanding and their response to the issue will grow over time. Our oldest students, Grades 7 and 8 students on the MacArthur Campus, participate in a service learning course each year. The class enables students to complement classroom learning about social issues—including homelessness, poverty, and hunger—with experiential learning by providing them with opportunities to engage in service in the larger community.
In between, children collect clothing, school supplies, and scholarship funds for our sister school in Haiti; make sandwiches and collect toiletries and blankets to accompany the Nursery soup on its rounds with St. Patrick’s families as part of the Salvation Army Grate Patrol; and conduct book and video drives to supply Children’s Hospital with entertainment resources for patients. Our goal remains to cultivate in our students, and across all members of our community, grateful hearts and habits of service.
