Service Learning
A Graduation Requirement
Los Angeles Unified School District incorporates Service Learning as a component to earn a diploma for students. All students who will be graduating from Chatsworth Charter High School have the opportunity to complete a Service Learning project.
How will Chatsworth Charter High School integrate Service Learning into the classroom?
Students will engage in the service learning through their U.S. History course with the course teacher.
Can students complete a Service Learning project on their own?
CCHS expects all students to successfully complete a classroom-based Service Learning project. Provisions will be made for all eleventh grade students to work on a school-supervised Service Learning project. Each project must have administrative approval and be supervised by a teacher or administrator. Students will not be able to fulfill the requirement on their own.
COMMUNITY SERVICE HOURS
Students need a minimum of 20 hours over the course of the high school career to meet graduation requirements. Chatsworth Charter High School's Leadership Council has decided that there is significant value to both programs, and enough difference between the two, to continue to require that students perform community service as well as complete the Service Learning project. However, it may be possible for a Service Learning project to fulfill the Community Service requirement.
WHAT IS SERVICE LEARNING?
Service Learning is a teaching/learning strategy in which students learn and develop through active participation in high quality service that meets the needs of a community. Service Learning strategies integrate into and enhance the rigorous academic curriculum. Service Learning is aligned with the state standards, fosters civic responsibility, and provides structured time for student reflection.
ELEMENTS OF HIGH-QUALITY SERVICE-LEARNING
- Core Academic Learning - The service experience enhances the knowledge, value, or skill goals of the class or school. The service-learning experience is an effective instructional strategy that is aligned to the state content standards identified for the course.
- Meaningful Service - The service experience helps to increase each student's sense of civic responsibility, meets a real need in the community as defined by the community, is appropriate to the student's age or development, is well organized, and results in a valued outcome.
- Student Voice - Students assist in planning, implementing, and evaluating the service-learning experience.
- Reflection - Students reflect prior to the service-learning experience to plan and prepare for the activities, during the experience to review and assess, and after the service-learning experience to evaluate the process and the activities.
- Collaboration - All stakeholders, including administrators, social service agencies, businesses, community and college partners, parents, students, and teachers, are involved in planning, implementing, and evaluating the service-learning experience.
SERVICE LEARNING IDEAS
- Tutor younger students in a subject you excel in;
- Coach physically disabled students in a team sport;
- Assist second-language speakers in enrolling their children in school;
- Tutor non-English speaking students in English;
- Participate in a local Habitat for Humanity home construction project;
- Befriend a student struggling with mental illness;
- Spend time with the elderly at a nursing home by visiting and listening to their stories;
- Clean-up a local river, stream or lake;
- Sing and play games with children suffering from disease/disability;
- Help to prepare and serve food in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter;
- Plant a community garden with community members;
- Organize a Read-a-Thon in your school or neighborhood;
- Offer your clerical skills to a local Special Olympics office;
Speak to Counselor for more Information.