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Singing Christmas carols to senior citizens...spending time with adults with disabilities... raising money for a children's hospital: At St. Thomas the Apostle School in Delmar, community service is part of the curriculum.

"We are here to follow the mission of Christ," said Theresa Heilsberg, a social studies teacher at St. Thomas. "We start very young by instructing, through doing, that we are the hands and we are the feet of Christ here on earth."

Each class claims a human service agency or topic for the year, starting with preschoolers at the parish food pantry and ending with eighth-graders, who focus on individual service projects.

The Kindergartners recently finished making Valentine's Day door hangers for the children at Ronald McDonald House in Albany, a temporary residence for families of children being treated for serious illnesses. The director speaks to the class about the sick children a few times a year.

Early start
Principal Thomas Kane said Kindergarten is a good time to open a child's eyes to the community because he or she spends more time away from home.

BY the second grade, a child is close to learning how to think abstractly and becomes aware of differences among people, Mr. Kane said; so this is a good time for the students to overcome their fear of the unknown by playing games with adults who have cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that affects body movement and muscle coordination.

Other classes focus on recycling and literacy. Seventh-graders recently sorted, weighed and boxed about 1,200 pounds of food at the Regional Food Bank in Latham. They also filled stockings with items like toothpaste, slippers, pajamas and small toys for the children and families at St. Anne's Institute in Albany, which provides residential and preventive services for teen girls.

Many of St. Thomas' 205 students - of whom 90 to 95 percent are Catholic - grow so attached to their projects that they continue visiting their friends at the senior center or the Reilly House for the physically disabled after the academic year ends.

A former student who chose malaria in Africa as an eighth-grade independent project continues to raise money for mosquito nets in high school. Another former student continues raising awareness about child labor.

Foreign affairs
Mrs. Heilsberg tells her eighth-graders to pick a national or international problem relating to genocide, hunger, homelessness or health, research it, choose an organization to partner with, write to a representative proposing solutions and deliver the letter during their four-day Washing-ton field trip in June - and design an advertising campaign to raise awareness.

This year's topics include water shortages in Nigeria; residents there are allotted 12 gallons daily, while Americans use 30 gallons before 9 a.m., one pupil told the class. Another child will research the confinement of Tibetan monks in China. Another still will study child soldiers in Africa.

Laura Miller, another eighth-grader, picked teenage pregnancy as her subject of study. She said the rate has increased since 2006 and more than half of teenage moms will get pregnant again. She chose the topic because she wants to raise awareness and prevent it from happening to people she loves.

Madeline Clyne said she wants to find an organization that distributes insecticide-treated bed nets to Africa to treat malaria because there is no effective vaccine. About 300 million people get diagnosed there every year, she told The Evangelist.

Bianca Folton said she will probably work with Free the Children, a group for youth in North America started to help children overseas. She is troubled by what she's read about child labor in Pakistan: Children as young as four work in carpet or brick factories in the mud and sun to pay off their parents' debt, which is usually less than $25. Employers fine children for mistakes and for the food they eat on the job.

Bianca now thinks twice about where her clothes were made.

"Chances are they were made by children younger than me," she said. "I think that if I raise awareness about that, even just in my school, it could help a lot. These children, they don't really know what it is to play. They're really adults from the age of four."

There's more to St. Thomas than social justice. Pupils begin learning a second language in Kindergarten. The school welcomed a resource room teacher this year to pay extra time and attention to about 20 students each week. Eighth-graders were offered the option to take an accelerated biology class this year.

These changes stretch the budget; a new course means extended faculty resources, new textbooks at $100 each and new lab materials.

Good news
The number of children at the school decreased slightly this year, Mr. Kane said, a change he attributed to the recession. Some parents were not able to afford the $4,300 tuition, even with financial aid.

However, the number of Kindergartners registered for next year has already surpassed the number in the current class.

Like all Catholic schools, there can be a disparity between families using the school and those joining the parish. Recently, however, Mr. Kane said more school families have been attending Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle. He interpreted this as evidence of the parents' commitment to raise their children in the faith.


(01/28/10)



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