by Jeffrey Stanley

Brooklyn Friends School has an incredibly long and rich history of community service that reaches back to its earliest days, but it was not until 1982 that a formal service learning program began at BFS. “Essentially I started the community service program at Brooklyn Friends," recalled an unabashed Ron Patterson. "I did it by having a big mouth. We were in a meeting and someone was talking about the Quaker tradition of community service, and I said ‘I think it's become a tradition and only that.’"

Principal Kay Edstene spoke to Ron the next day about his impassioned remark in the meeting and urged him to write down his thoughts as a formal proposal. "I did that and gave it to her," he said. Soon after, Ron’s proposal was approved by the entire school and the Outreach Program officially began in September, 1982, with Ron coordinating the program.

Nearly overnight BFS had joined the forefront of only a handful of schools at that time to have a service learning requirement. The school began hosting annual service fairs in 1983 as a way for community agencies to gain BFS student volunteers and soon opened the fairs to other independent schools. By the end of that first year, Ron was being invited to speak about service learning at other schools and at the fledgling Youth Services Opportunities Project (YSOP).

Prior to Outreach, BFS had a well-established in-school service requirement in which Upper School students took an active role in the daily operations of BFS through cleaning and assisting faculty and staff. By taking on such responsibilities, students gained an understanding and appreciation of the fact that being part of a community means being responsible for it. Still, the closest thing the school had to a formal community service requirement was an internship for twelfth graders overseen by teachers Larry Weiss and Don Knies which began in the 1970s, but it was geared toward gaining career experience rather than volunteerism.

"My recommendation was a two-tiered way of getting kids involved in service," said Ron. In ninth and tenth grade, students would work on a weekly basis assisting in one of the lower divisions: tutoring foreign language students in the Middle School for example, or acting as teacher's assistants in the lower grades. Juniors would be required to complete at least three hours of service per week at an outside organization. Seniors had the internship program available, although some who'd had a good experience at a nonprofit agency as juniors opted to do their senior internships there, he recalled.

Ron had grown up in New England, and majored in psychoanalysis and literature and anthropology and literature. He taught at some small colleges before coming to BFS as an English teacher. "Friends was the one place where I could actually use my tri-major," he quipped. "I used to teach psychology and anthropology in alternating years in addition to English courses." He was willing to add to his teaching load by becoming the school's first community service director, or "outreach coordinator" as he came to be called.

Ron also proposed that reflection be a key element of the program. "Community service requires as much education and instruction as any other field, so we'd meet on a weekly basis and talk about how to go on an interview and how to make sure the agency could give you the experience you wanted." He hoped to match students with a placement that matched their area of interest or curiosity. Reflection time would also give him a chance to talk about topics like death, and how the students would handle it if an elderly or sick person with whom they were working suddenly passed away. "For many it would be their first time confronting it. It would be irresponsible to throw kids into situations and say ‘Here you go, deal with it.’" He also required students to keep journals of their experiences, and at the end of the placement the agency would provide a written evaluation of the student which would go into the student's record, to be used later as a job reference if they needed it.

One year after the BFS Outreach Program began in 1982, High School: A Report on Secondary Education by Ernest L. Boyer changed education in the United States with its recommendation that “every high school student complete a service requirement … involving volunteer work in the community or at school.” Ron recalled the report recommended “that all American high school students do 100 hours of community service. That got tied up in some litigation in Connecticut. Some group termed it involuntary servitude, sued and won, so it's never become a requirement for graduation in public schools."

Independent schools, however, were quick to realize the importance of community service. By 1984, other independent schools interested in service learning were looking to BFS for a model. Ron, as Outreach Coordinator, applied for a grant from the E.E. Ford Foundation and was awarded $25,000 to further develop the program. The grant also supported publication of a small magazine called Outreach for the BFS and New York independent school communities.

Ron also urged the faculty to develop service components to their courses wherever possible. "Dance teacher Marna Herrity was very active in developing dance outreach," he said. She arranged for dance students to perform at a nearby senior citizens center and also lead movement exercises with the residents. "And art teacher Vince Pinto developed something called the Mural Project." One of their first efforts was at St. Joseph's Services for Children which was then across the street from BFS. "They put up a peg board with different shapes and figures which let kids with appointments for foster placement have something to do while they waited to be seen."

For The Face of War, a course then co-taught by Don Knies and Lawrence Gibson using literature and history to examine 20th century conflicts, Ron suggested that the class could be made more vivid by adding interaction between the students and elderly veterans, refugees or holocaust survivors. "We bought a bunch of tape recorders with part of the grant money. Students would learn interview techniques and then go out and interview these people, and on some occasions some of the interviewees would come into class as guest speakers." Lastly, Ron envisioned reciprocity as a key element of the program, meaning students should get something out of volunteering, too. It should be in educational or rewarding for them in tangible ways. "It's not just, ‘We're going out and being altruistic and providing a service to others.’ It was for students to gain something back." As an example Ron mentioned Marna's students' dance forays to the senior center, which evolved into the students helping the seniors choreograph a dance show of their own which they then performed for the dance students in a special concert.

How did the students react to the community service requirement? "Some kids were, ‘Oh this'll look great on my college resume,’ and some faculty would say, ‘That's not right, that's not altruistic.’ And I'd say, ‘I don't care what gets them there, I don't care what the kid's motivation is if it gets them to experience the real world.’" Ron said he always preferred to call it "service learning" instead of community service, seeing it as a kind of civics class. "You go out and see how grass roots activity can cause social change, and it also helps students develop a sense of empathy for others."

Ron left BFS in 1998 and moved to Oregon to live near his daughter. Never one to rest, he began seeking community service opportunities in the Portland area. "There's a very active green movement here, there has been for many years, so I thought I would get involved in that." One day he was in town and saw that a lot of kids were "stanging" as they called it, a blend of the words standing and change, as in standing around asking for pocket change, or to put it more familiarly, panhandling.

Ron did some checking and was surprised to learn that Portland had a high percentage of homeless or runaway kids. "So I looked around and found an organization focused on helping youth." He worked there for six months and the organization got a grant to work with the Portland police helping teens who had been arrested for minor offenses. "Instead of going to jail they came and worked with us. I counseled at the reception center for ten years working with kids 11 to 18 years old."

A year after Ron left BFS, Carla Precht’s daughter entered the BFS kindergarten and Carla joined the PAT, soon becoming chair of the PAT community service committee. “Everybody asked if I knew Ron and that he was dynamite but I never met him,” she said.

Ron's departure from the school had left a void, and the community service program soon became fragmented. “When I came on board community service was being done differently by each division,” Carla said.

Carla brought together these coordinators for a group assessment and to create a more standardized set of school-wide criteria; for example, assignments should meet a real need in the community, the assignments should be age-appropriate, and, in keeping with Ron’s original vision, contain a strong reflective element.

A key component, also in keeping with Ron's original vision, was learning. "It's the difference between, say, a traditional food drive and an activity in which children are getting to ask, why are we doing this, how do I feel about it, what impact will it have?" explained Carla.

"It's very simple, it's taking a pulse before and after." Beforehand for example, when first graders go to visit a senior center for the first time their teachers get them thinking and talking about their pre-existing relationships with elderly people. "Do you have any elderly people in your family? Do they live alone? What's your relationship like with them? This gets the kids thinking," she said, "so that when they go to a senior center they aren't shocked, they have some empathy." Afterward, students talk openly together about what they saw and learned, what made them uncomfortable or what surprised them. "You ask the students what they learned and you do it without any judgment. The goal of reflection is to build empathy, compassion and a sense of responsibility."

Carla is careful with semantics when talking to kids about their community service work, urging them to avoid words like "help" or "the needy" or "the homeless" or even "charity," because although well-intentioned she fears it creates an attitude that some people are less than others, a sense of elitism in the student body. She describes the ideal community service interaction as one which benefits both the student and the organization and isn't just a one-sided "good deed."

In keeping with that goal, this spring the PAT community service committee arranged a landscaping project with nearby P.S. 307, BFS’s Horizons National partner school. "Rather than go in and say we're gonna plant trees and bushes for you," said Carla, "we went through a process of working with the teachers and parents, not just us going in and taking over but building a friendship, a partnership. We hope they'll be coming to our school, too."

Projects still take place within the school as well, where it's now referred to not as community service but as community-building. Examples include the buddy program in which older grades are paired with younger grades for academic and social activities. The Upper School too requires that students complete a number of hours of in-school community service.

Upper School Head Roxanne Zazzaro remembers Ron Patterson in the late 1990’s well. She was a new Middle and Upper School teacher then, and recounted a class he taught which linked local news stories about the environment with community service opportunities. Students would join forces to take on the projects, and she vividly recalled the many cleanup and painting efforts in Columbus Plaza, the once-beautiful, but then neglected park and neighborhood eyesore that became the site of the current Marriott Hotel.

She remembered too the meetings which began taking place at that time on the topic of student service. "It went through various phases," she said, "and many discussions around the idea of service. What constituted service? Was it social activism? The hours increased and the types of service that we wanted students to be involved in were formulated."

Another evolution within the service learning program at BFS took place in fall of 2007 with the launch of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program, in which all eleventh and twelfth graders must participate in the Creativity, Action and Service requirement. "What the faculty like about this program is the reflection piece," she said, in which "students are required to keep a portfolio and reflect on the service they did," echoing Ron's vision from the 1980's. "In addition we want our students to move away from counting hours and move more toward understanding the reasons to do service and the satisfaction that comes from helping.

"“Some students already get that,” Roxanne added, “and often complete hours of service on their own which they don't even bother to document. It is a part of learning. Students can create opportunities for themselves and classmates," said Roxanne, "locally, nationally and globally." As Ron learned, a community service program also requires constant nurturing by the faculty. "Sometimes teachers will come to me and say I'm not sure what I want to do but I want it to revolve around clean water, or around homelessness, and I try to put them with the right organization," said Carla, again echoing her predecessor's vision. "When a faculty member is passionate about something themselves that's the best situation because we need the complete buy-in of teachers to make it happen."

In the end, Carla believes the BFS community service program must continue toward a clear and simple ideal: "that when students leave here part of their nature and part of their being is to want to be a support in their community, not as an imposition or obligation, but as something natural they carry with them.” Indeed, many of our alums, of all ages, consider community service an integral part of their BFS experience and choose to weave community service into their adult lives.