CHS students gave back to the community last Thursday. Forums went around to various parks in the area to work with the Natural Area Preservation (NAP). Some activities included sawing Buckthorn trees and restoring old trails. Though many had a good time, few took note of the planning that went behind the scenes to make this event happen.
“You know, actually the Natural Area Preservation in the city of Ann Arbor does, in my opinion, a far larger amount of planning then I have to do to get the school ready to do this, because they have to get actually all the volunteers to meet at the each of sites and determine where work should be done. So they tell me how many forums they need at each site. And now that we’ve done this a while, it took a lot of planning the first time we did it which I think was not last school year but the year before, in the spring of what would have been 2010 and the first time we did it we did a garlic mustard pull. That took the most amount of planning because it was our first time doing it, we were still figuring things out. So now it just takes a little tweaking,” said Marci Tuzinsky, the main organizer of the event.
Tuzinsky has been spearheading the operation since its beginning in 2007. “The very first time we did it we did it we did half the school went to the parks, and half of the schools went to elementary schools in the area, to give back. And, each elementary school had a different list, kind of a honey-do list for the kids to do. All involved doing stuff outside. Some of it was weeding, some of it was digging and putting in new stuff. But at the end of that very first event, that one took a lot of work because it was interfacing with six different schools plus the natural area of preservation. So logistically for me it was very hard,” she said.
“But at the end of the day, everyone who went to all the events did a evaluation and people felt like the students who had the experience in the parks enjoyed it more because there was more to do they already had volunteers in place who were used to running these kind of work days for large amounts of people. And although we wanted to do these for local elementary schools, they don’t really have a staff there to direct a group of students on what they want done. So there was a lot of inconsistentcy and everyone said can we just do all parks from now on. So after that its just been all parks.”
Forum community service day, Tuzinsky said, was originally an idea from forum council.
“I still see it as a brainchild of forum council, as an idea that came out of students wanting to say ‘oh, it was part of the green week can we do something, we’re all going and working in the parks.’ They had this idea but didn’t know quite how to pull it off, so they came to me and I started making some phone calls and made some partnerships and we just kind of went forward from there,” she said.
Tuzinsky uses a lot of her own time to organize the event. “I think getting them on the calendar is key so like for example, our events last year and this year were all planned—the date was picked before the previous school year was up. When we planned the entire school calendar. And what we tried to do is, with the exception of this fall, because we had some things that came up and I’ll talk about that later. How it came up is we have these early release days. Three Wednesdays a year in which the staff does professional development in the afternoon. And if we do a shortened Friday schedule on those days, every class is maybe a half hour and so as a school, we felt we wanted to do something that was a little more meaningful and we’ve always said that we were [interested in] community service anyway, and so when forum council came to staff meeting and presented this as a idea, they said ‘we would love to do this, would you guys support this?’ and we said ‘yeah, this would be a great time to do it because its kind of, it’s a win win.’ ”
“Forum council had this idea, they didn’t know how and when to pull it off and we said “you know there are these mornings three times a year. So that’s when we got into the habit of doing one in the fall, early realease date and one in the spring, early release date. This fall, our early release date got messed up because the state moved count day after we set the calendar. But everybody was wedded to it, nobody wanted to give it up so we just shortened yesterday and did it anyway.”
Even though this event takes a lot of time and energy on Tuzinsky’s part, she says that she is more than willing to do it next year.
“If the students and the staff still want to do it then I’ll be happy to organize it because I think it’s a great marriage between the philosophy of Community high school and to give back and the idea that we should get out and have fun together so, we hope that it’ll continue.”
