The World as a Classroom
Written by Patty Rasmussen Thursday, August 18 2011
When she attended high school at the Ursuline Academy of Dallas, Melinda French Gates, learned a valuable lesson that changed her life and, ultimately, the lives of millions of people around the world. While tutoring students in a math class at a nearby public school, Gates witnessed, firsthand, inequities in education.
“Ursuline teaches us that the world is a larger place than just family and friends,” she said during the dedication of a new math, science, and technology building at Ursuline last year. “What separates you from the rest of the world is not what you’ve earned but what you have been given. The people in the developing world have been given very little – you have been given very much. And from those to whom much is given, much is expected.” Gates and her husband, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, started the Gates Foundation which has given more than $21 million to global health and development programs.
Service is a core value at Ursuline, an all-girls school with a 138-year history. Ursuline students are expected to compile 100 hours of community service by the end of high school. Their motto, “Serviam,” means, “I will serve,” and it’s more than a slogan.
Atlanta Girls’ School and Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami likewise emphasize service and urge students to get outside the school to experience the challenges so many people face.
“Service becomes part of our student’s consciousness,” says Elizabeth Bourgeois, principal at Ursuline. “And the impact of actually doing makes service come alive.”
Bourgeois recounts a story of a rising senior at Ursuline who attended a conference session at the school’s Global Issues Day this past spring. The student was challenged during a speech by Kim Bouldin-Jones, an educator and specialist in the field of HIV/AIDS prevention, who has worked extensively in Africa.
On her own, the student decided to she wanted to go to Africa to help. She figured out a way to make the trip to Sierra Leone with a local ophthalmologist. After returning home this month, the student stopped by Bourgeois’ office, bubbling with enthusiasm and ideas. “She said,” Bourgeois recalls, ‘I know if they had computers in their lab it would help them. Do you think we could help them get computers?’ I told her that was going to be her project. And she’ll do it.”
In addition to student-initiated service trips, Ursuline provides students with travel opportunities through student exchanges with sister schools in China, Peru, Brazil, and England – almost always including an element of service.
Class service trips have been the norm for students at Atlanta Girls’ School (AGS) for years, but now AGS is combining travel and service and taking it to another level. Beginning with the class of 2014, all upper-school students, grades 9 through 12, are required to make at least one service trip prior to graduation.
“AGS is a young school, and one thing that was always important to us in terms of how we educate our girls is that they see themselves as citizens of the world,” explains Corinne Dedini, academic dean at AGS and head of the Global Education Program. “There are some things that can only be learned outside the four walls of the school. Creating this requirement ensures that the girls will see the world through a broader lens.”
Vanessa Alamo was a 14-year-old freshman at AGS when she took her first overseas trip, with her class, to Costa Rica. The trip focused on environmental biology, included a community service project – planting mangroves along the coastline – and also a home stay with a host family. She was hooked. This past May, Alamo, now 16, went to Ecuador to study the link between education and poverty with a group of students on an AGS trip cosponsored by CARE.
“My passion is to improve education in developing countries,” Alamo says. “While I was there I went to several different schools and talked to the students about the education system, their situations at home, why some students had to leave school, or why others couldn’t graduate. I became even more interested in the subject of poverty and education and how I could help while living in the United States.”
The students met 10 girls preparing to graduate from high school with no hope of furthering their education because of a lack of money. Alamo and her peers returned home with an ambitious plan to host a series of events, including a 5K road race, to raise the money to send the Ecuadoran girls to college.
“We want to help them by raising the money for their first year of college,” she says. “Our hope is that those girls will finish college then go back to their communities and educate the youth coming up.”
Alamo’s experiences and her proactive response highlight exactly why AGS puts monetary support behind the Global Education Program. The school offers financial aid for trips. “We don’t cover the entire cost of the trip, but we do supplement the cost for families who need it,” Dedini says. “We want to create a program that’s accessible to all our girls, and some of the families work really hard just to pay the tuition. But this is an institution that values these experiences and is willing to supplement them, monetarily.”
Like Ursuline Academy and AGS, Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami, Fla., is a girls’ school that emphasizes service to the global community.
Carrollton’s “Heart of Haiti” club was founded by senior Molly Nuell, 17, who has traveled to Haiti three times, and, with the support of the school community, is helping build a school for children in the village of La Colline.
Her first trip took place in December 2009, just weeks before the devastating earthquake struck in January 2010. She has returned twice, in May and August, and plans for the school are progressing; construction should begin soon. The school will serve about 240 children; it will be public, with no tuition.
“Education really is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty,” Nuell says. “And by education I mean formal education or something as simple as teaching a nurse how to perform a new skill. The goal is to get people to the point that they can do something independently.”
Carrollton students of all ages have chipped in to support the cause. Two primary school girls donated the proceeds of their lemonade stand to the La Colline school project. And the Haiti Club regularly hosts fundraisers, like movie nights, selling concessions and running the parking for an art festival near the school.
“Everyone has gotten involved and this project has brought our community even closer,” Nuell says.
It’s clear that travel is making an impact on students in ways that hit close to home. “When you grow up in a big metropolitan area you come to expect certain standards of living that simply are not the norm for the majority of people on our planet,” Dedini says.
“Students gain a lasting appreciation for what they have, and they recognize that they are in a position of power and can work for the marginalized. Often they come back and become advocates,” she says. “There’s a lasting connection for the girls, and they become empowered to try to do something to change the world themselves.”
Patty Rasmussen is an Atlanta-based freelance writer. She spent 12 years covering the Atlanta Braves for ChopTalk Magazine and has written for Major League Baseball publications, Georgia Trend magazine, WebMD, and Blue Ridge Country.
