With school back in session, Poly students’ minds are overflowing with to-dos: pick the right classes, ace that first test, and make new friends. And don’t forget: service hours. Poly students are required to complete forty hours of community service to be eligible to graduate.
According to Poly Head of Service Learning and History Teacher Elijah Sivin, Poly offers Student Learning Teams (SLTs), which meet after school twice a week for eight weeks to fulfill all forty required service hours. SLTs focus on a particular topic; for instance, Poly junior Charlotte Kuchinad participated in the sustainability SLT during her sophomore year. Where students learned about sustainability in general at Poly and then broke into groups that tackled specific challenges. Kuchinad worked to teach lower school students about sustainability on and off campus.
Kuchinad advocates for students to join an SLT group. She said she “[thinks] the SLT is the move because it’s very efficient. It only takes a couple of months, but still, at the same time, you’re working with your peers to do something, and you can choose what you’re doing.”
While Kuchinad, a member of the Poly’s sustainability club, chose the sustainability SLT group because she had a personal interest in the topic, Poly offers a range of SLTs. This gives students the freedom to choose one that aligns with their own interests and goals.
Students can even start their own SLT if they have a passion that no other SLT addresses. Senior Zoë Campbell started a new SLT group, “Native American History at Poly,” that will work with History Teacher Beth Eby to increase education about Indigenous people at Poly.
SLTs during the school year are not a good option for everyone because many Poly students have after-school commitments such as sports, theater, or dance. Sivin said summer SLTs such as Journalism and Media Studies Faculty Member Rachael Allen’s “Civics Journalism SLT” offers a good alternative for those who cannot participate after school.
Poly also provides a wide range of non-SLT service options. For example, Sivin said students can apply to be a peer tutor and help push students to be their best academically.
The Polar Plunge, which supports the Special Olympics, is another opportunity to get service hours. Senior Tallaluh Glancy, who organizes the Polar Plunge at Poly, said the event, in which students jump into cold water from Staten Island, “helps to raise awareness for the neurodivergent community, [including] people with Autism and Down Syndrome.” Glancy volunteers with the neurodivergent community outside of the Polar Plunge as well. She hopes to take twenty neurodivergent students from the nearby school HRC to the Brooklyn Aquarium, a Mets game, and a pumpkin patch.
Students are also welcome to complete their service hours through projects and volunteering for non-profit organizations of their own choosing, as long as Sivin approves the program.
Sivin wants Poly students to develop a connection to the service projects they complete and to focus less on hours and more on the acts of service. “I’ve been trying to find ways to shift the focus a bit from just the idea of accumulating hours,” he explained. Opportunities like SLTs, Sivin said, are intended not just to allow students to fulfill their requirement but to “give students multiple routes where they feel they’re on a meaningful education path.”
Other schools in New York require more service hours than Poly does: Horace Mann and Riverdale Country Day School both require eighty hours. However, the Packer Collegiate Institute does not have a service hours requirement. According to the Packer website, “Rather than completing a certain number of ‘service hours,’ Packer students engage authentically in the community through a range of projects that address local and global issues.”
Sivin would prefer for Poly to implement a similar model but said, “This is the system I inherited, and I haven’t figured out a way to get everyone to do something if I don’t have something like service hours.”
