attempting to convince a potential employee to join a new school. But I also saw the intrigued look on her face after I mentioned our ideas about service. At the conclusion of the interview, she told me she would give me an answer within a week. When Kim called us the next week to accept our offer, we couldn’t have been more pleased. We knew we had the right person to lead us forward in our plans to develop a service learning program that would be uniquely Ursuline in nature. And soon after Kim’s arrival in New Orleans, she began to look at the challenges, both logistical and philosophical, that we faced in devising such a program. One of the big challenges we faced was how to design a program that would truly address the Ursuline’s chapter call to “go beyond one’s borders,” as St. Angela says. Many service programs allow students to work to provide service where the students feel comfortable. For example, a student who enjoys working with animals can, in such programs, volunteer to work in a zoo for four or five years. While much good can come from such programs, we felt that for our program to be a true “service learning program,” we would need to force our students to “go beyond their (comfort) borders” and work with people they might not have chosen with whom to work. Such a program would require Ursuline to develop working relationships with service providers in the metropolitan area. Kim’s response to this challenge was ingenious. She identified five areas for service opportunities that existed in the greater New Orleans area: work with the elderly, work with youth and literacy, work with adults who had special needs, work with the hungry, and work with the homeless. Each grade level would work with one of these specific service learning areas over the course of the entire academic year. Kim found service providers in these needs areas who have been willing to partner with Ursuline in these projects. Our eighth graders, who work with the elderly, spend time at Covenant Home in Uptown New Orleans, while our ninth graders work with youngsters at St. John the Baptist Head Start Program in Central City. Our tenth graders work with adults with special needs at PACE on Napoleon Avenue, whereas our eleventh graders work at Second Harvest Food Bank in Elmwood. Finally, our seniors work with the homeless at the St. Joseph Rebuild Center in downtown New Orleans. An effective service learning program surely serves as a call to action to the school community, but it must also serve as a call to prayer and reflection. To address this need, Kim worked with the High School’s Theology Department to effectively integrate service learning into the Department’s curriculum. Our students use the concept of the Pastoral Circle, where experience leads to social analysis leads to theological reflection leads to discernment leads to action, as the model for our program. Our theology teachers have their students write about their experiences in the service
learning program so that they might reflect upon what their faith tells them about injustice and, therefore, what they are called to do about injustice in the world around them. The written reflection each student submits to her teacher is a major academic assessment during each grading period of the school year. Just as important as “going beyond one’s borders” through the Service Learning Program is the concept of building relationships with the people our students serve. As we designed the program, we felt it was critical that students build relationships with those they serve so that we might “see the face of Christ in others.” The sense of empathy so important in effective service learning programs must be developed through relationships — which means that our girls must have the opportunity to know those they serve over multiple meetings and work. Ursuline’s Service Learning Program has been designed so that each student’s Theology class visits its respective service provider once each academic marking period, or four times a year. The repeated visits to each agency allow students to build relationships with the people they serve. We also require that each student contribute an additional ten service hours in a related field as part of their yearly service requirement. As a result, many Ursuline students work their additional hours at the same agency they visit with their class, further deepening their relationships with the people they met during their class visits. And relationship-building is really at the core of Ursuline’s Service Learning Program. I accompanied our senior class to the Rebuild Center for their first trip back in August of 2010 and watched them board the busses loaded down with board games and decks of cards — under the strict orders of their Campus Minister. Kim told the girls that she wanted them to talk and interact with the homeless people they were about to meet. She didn’t want our students to stand behind a counter and serve them a meal; she asked them to treat the homeless as people. Sure enough, within minutes our girls were playing games with the clients and, in the process, talking with them and learning about them. It was a great first day. But we didn’t have to wait long before we saw the service seeds that had been planted during those first trips come alive before our eyes. Less than three months after the first service learning trip to the Rebuild Center, the High School Administration had scheduled a faculty workshop on a Friday in early November. As we were about to start the workshop, Kim approached me outside the library and told me that twenty of our seniors had come to school that morning — on a student holiday, no less! — and asked if they could journey down to the Rebuild Center to visit the “friends” they had made over the last couple of months. Needless to say, Kim and I were both stunned by the girls’ appearance on campus, and their request to visit the Rebuild Center. I excused Kim from the workshop and 9