Morristown school makes service push

MORRISTOWN — The Morristown Central School District is reaching out to teachers and local businesses to try to increase community service work.

The district will send out a survey with its March newsletter asking teachers and businesses about past student community service projects. The results will be compiled into an index that district officials hope will ease the process for setting up projects.

"The goal is to, at some point, have something one could hold in their hand to say, 'Here's all the things that we do here, so if you're looking for ideas, look through it,'" district Superintendent David A. Glover said. "It's an effort to share information, get new ideas and keep working towards our mission."

According to Mr. Glover, the district pushes students at all grade levels to get involved with the community. Students completed about 10 projects during the past year, including meeting with nursing home residents and washing trucks for the Morristown Fire Department, he said.

The projects typically are part of extracurricular work, but Mr. Glover said he hopes the index will help teachers integrate community work into their lesson plans.

"For a teacher that might be doing (one activity), that activity might work very well for another instructional unit at a different grade level," he said. "It could be as simple as kindergartners collecting pennies for people in Haiti, and seeing how many pennies did they gather."

Mr. Glover said the efforts to increase the community outreach are part of the school's long-term strategic management plan.

"Part of our plan is using community resources and having kids work within the community to get an ethical world view," he said. "And we hope as we're working on things, we can incorporate something from the community as part of the learning."