YSCAL Blog

How do you see your own faith journey interacting with service?

What has been your experience with Community-Based Service-Learning?

by Sher Moua

I gulped down clam chowder sold from a truck, made quick work of a barbecue pork taco, chomped down a barbecued hot-link drenched in spicy barbecue sauce, and debated which was the better of two delectable homemade tamales with my friends all in one evening. This food was only sample of what was available at this year’s Eat Real Festival at Jack London Square in Oakland, CA, and it was delicious. My friends who know me know that I can eat, and I would’ve had everything there twice over had it not been for one very interesting competition.

It was a butchering competition. Two teams of three butchers each competed to see which team was superior in butchering a quarter steer. The teams were judged based on speed, cuts, and teamwork.

While I appreciated the craftsmanship of these guys—I’ve butchered many cattle and I’ve seen few knives move with such precision and speed—what really intrigued me was learning about how this steer was raised.

During the competition, the meat producers’ commentary shed light on the production of a consumer-ready steer: the age of slaughter, the feed, and where it is raised. While they were sharing this information, my mind couldn’t help but drift to the last burger, the last steak, and the last beef product that I consumed. It was in this drift that I realized that I knew next to nothing about where the beef I was eating came from or how it was produced. It was a frightening discovery.

The beef I’ve consumed isn’t anything like this steer—I know because I couldn’t afford the cuts from this steer. It was grass-fed and grass-finished over a period of 12-18 months on pastures nestled in Point Reyes National Seashore and hand-processed by skilled butchers. At the same time, as a consumer, I’m so far removed from the process of raising, slaughtering, and butchering animals like this steer that I can barely experience and comprehend the effects of meat consumption on my long-term health, the animals, and the environment.

An interesting thing happened to me last week. I was interviewed. Naomi Shachter, an extraordinary Shinnyo-en fellow asked me to reflect on an experience in my life that changed me spiritually. I reflected on my past and my struggles and what those might mean to someone who had been through them like myself. But what really made a difference that day for me was how I remembered having days without any reflection in my life at all. These days were just filled with going from moment to another and not really living in them. I began to understand what it meant to reflect on the times in my life that were so valuable and in doing so realized something else that day with Naomi- that my own reflection was the key to my appreciation of the experiences in my life. Although, this may seem obvious to others, for me, it was another experience in which I was able to take stock of the things I had in life and truly feel blessed by them. The tool of reflection is vital to an individuals spirit. If we can not reflect on what we are doing, what we have done, and consider what we will do then how can we expect to grow, and further more change?

by Sher Moua

This past weekend I attended the annual Exploring the Spiritual, Cultural and Religious Roots of Service Retreat. It was my third time at the retreat—and by great measure, my most enjoyable experience yet.

Unlike the two previous retreats, I went into this retreat with an open mind and a clear focus: to listen and to be present. I spoke less. I listened more—and with intent. I did not seek to connect the stories and experiences of others with my own, but rather, I sought to put myself in their shoes. This practice is, of course, easier said than done, and as I learned throughout the course of the weekend, quite a challenge. However, in the few instances and brief moments that I perfected this practice, I felt at peace.

By Marty Duckenfield
National Dropout Prevention Center

It is heartening to those of us involved for decades in dropout prevention to see our colleagues at all levels of education acknowledge the connection between service-learning and keeping kids in school. Most of the focus of the recent flurry of reports has been on the secondary level, whether middle or high school, with dropout summits and reports about kids saying why they left school….and that service-learning is a wonderful way to re-engage these young people in school and in developing their plans for a positive future.
What I want to bring to readers’ attention today, however, is that real dropout prevention starts much earlier, and the research that the National Dropout Prevention Center conducted with Communities In Schools in 2007 bears this out. Risk Factors and Exemplary Programs, found at this URL, and the risk factors that relate to dropout can be found in the Executive Summary.
http://www.dropoutprevention.org/resource/major_reports/communities_in_schools.htm.
The key points from the research are:

• Dropping out of school is related to a variety of factors.

• There is no single risk factor that can be used to accurately predict who is at risk of dropping out.

• The accuracy of dropout predictions increases when combinations of multiple risk factors are considered.

• Dropouts are not a homogeneous group. Many subgroups of students can be identified based on when risk factors emerge, the combinations of risk factors experienced, and how the factors influence them.

• Students who drop out often cite factors across multiple domains and there are complex interactions among risk factors.

• Dropping out of school is often the result of a long process of disengagement that may begin before a child enters school.

• Dropping out is often described as a process, not an event, with factors building and compounding over time.

Service-learning has long been promoted by the NDPC as a vehicle for school reform, and this report supports that approach. Dropping out is not just caused by academic failure although so much of the focus of No Child Left Behind and its legacy has not acknowledged that fact.

True dropout prevention, therefore, should be focused on multiple causes and should begin in the earliest years. If students and their families are engaged with the school through school and community service-learning projects; if children are excited about coming to school with the applied learning and experiential education afforded by service-learning; if attendance is up because of that excitement; and if children are learning to work and share together via these real-life experiences; well, then, perhaps the issues that tend to surface more dramatically at the middle and high school levels—leading to dropout—will disappear.

I would love to hear from elementary teachers who have seen how service-learning has helped them connect with children who might be perceived as at risk of dropping out someday; how service-learning has neutralized some of the risk factors that are often beyond our control; and how children are developing the traits of resilience which are fostered by service-learning—traits that will enable them to overcome the odds and attain success in school and in life.

These would be great stories, and sharing these might broaden the perspective of those educators who are seeing the connection between service-learning and dropout prevention—that they may now turn some of the spotlight onto the elementary grades. The trend seems to be that there is less service-learning at the elementary level, and this is terrible news. I hope that you will share some of these stories with the readers of this blog and perhaps begin to stop that unfortunate trend.

by Laurel Greyson

Last week I came into a rather interesting situation involving a slumlord and my rights. Despite the yet unknown outcome, the predicament has left me to ponder the legal system, and such things as individual rights, justice, freedom, and liberty for all.

Although my situation is minor in the grand scope of life and everyone else’s problems, it has allowed me to humbly reflect on just how lucky I really am. I remember when I was a little girl, every time I would loose or misplace something and end up in a frenzied state of frustration, my Grandma would gladly say “at least it’s not an arm or leg”, much to my annoyance. Yet, her phrase certainly did leave an impression on me, and I continue to remind myself daily that I have my health, education, family, my arms, and my legs.

Unfortunately, this is not the case for a large majority of California’s young people, many of them my peers, or just a few years younger who are people of color. These youth deserve the same access to health, education, power, justice, security and protection as any other group. However, in our current society, these basic human rights are not being granted, which is exactly why Youth Service California exists and works to serve communities of color that are not valued, are overlooked, disregarded, disempowered, and oppressed to end this cycle of powerlessness and empower the young people through engaged action.

Whether we are fighting to get money from a con-artist, or for individual, social, environmental, health, or educational rights, both adults and youth of all races must take a stand for what is right and just by confronting power and making real change. What is liberty for all, after all?

by Don Hill

Success in organizations is certainly dependent on strong leadership but equally important and often overlooked is the crucial importance of effective followers.
Robert Kelley wrote a persuasive article several years ago for the Harvard Business Review that underlined this point.

Effective followers share a number of essential qualities:

1. They manage themselves well. Paradoxically, the key to being an effective follower is the ability to think for one-self – to exercise control and independence and to work without close supervision. Good followers are people to whom a leader can safely delegate responsibility, people who anticipate needs at their own level of competence and authority.

2. They are committed to the organization and to a purpose, principle, or person outside themselves.

3. They build their competence and focus their efforts for maximum impact. Good followers take on extra work gladly, but first they do a superb job on their core responsibilities. They are good judges of their own strengths and weaknesses, and they contribute well to teams.

4. They are courageous, honest, and credible. They establish themselves as independent, critical thinkers whose knowledge and judgment can be trusted. They give credit where credit is due, admitting mistakes and sharing successes. They form their own views and ethical standards and stand up for what they believe in.

We all are followers at some time in our work- demonstrating these four essential qualities will be an ongoing asset for our organization.

by Carlos Porras

As it relates to the article posted in the déjà vu post consider this article and notice the date.

Who’s Minding the Air at Your Child’s School?

By RACHEL MORELLO-FROSCH, MANUEL PASTOR and CARLOS PORRAS

Rachel Morello-Frosch is an assistant professor of health education at San Francisco State University. MANUEL PASTOR is director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community at UC Santa Cruz. CARLOS PORRAS is executive director of Communities for a Better Environment

Los Angeles Times, June 03, 2001

SANTA CRUZ — Both President George W. Bush and Gov. Gray Davis want schools to meet tougher standards, to be accountable to parents and to improve student performance. But enhancing education requires going beyond the basics of testing, teacher training and curriculum reform. A study we conducted in the Los Angeles Unified School District suggests that a school’s environment can impair learning.

For a decade, researchers have raised concerns about the rise in learning disabilities among children in the U.S. Approximately 12 million children suffer from learning, developmental or behavioral problems; the number of students enrolled in special-education programs has increased nearly 200% over the last 20 years. Soaring rates of childhood asthma, especially among inner-city youth, have been linked to school absenteeism and diminished learning capacity. Increasingly, scientists and regulators see environmental pollution as a potential cause.

Many studies have investigated the short-term effects of dirty air–eye irritation, coughing and chest tightness–on the health of adults. New research suggests that polluted air may also have long-term adverse effects on kids. Researchers looking at the Los Angeles Basin, for example, recently concluded that air pollutants commonly found in smog can significantly impair lung growth and function in children.

Most studies on the health of children’s environments focus on conditions in their neighborhoods. Yet, children can also encounter hazards at their schools. True, a majority of students in Los Angeles live and attend school in the same neighborhoods, but a significant number of them cross town on an army of buses to attend magnet schools or simply because their neighborhood schools are overcrowded; many white middle-class students attend private schools far from their homes.

There have been dramatic examples of environmental hazards located near some Southern California schools. Many parents of students at Suva Elementary and Intermediate schools in Bell Gardens blamed chrome-plating plants nearby for a cluster of cancer cases among students and teachers. While health officials and researchers could not demonstrate a causal link, community and parental pressure forced clean-ups at the two sites. Last week, similar pressure forced the LAUSD to promise removal of arsenic-tainted soil at Park Avenue Elementary in Cudahy.

Cases like Suva and Park, where more than 95% of the students are Latino, have reinforced concerns that pollution and its effects may not be an equal-opportunity problem. If environmental risks are disproportionately concentrated at minority schools, and their effects spread beyond health to include student achievement, then they are another obstacle in the path of children who already face barriers of poverty, neighborhood instability and underperforming schools.

To explore these questions, we recently examined the distribution of potential environmental risks among schoolchildren in LAUSD. The local environmental conditions of each school were mapped. A school’s racial composition, test scores, teacher experience and other variables were determined so patterns could be revealed. The results were striking.

Using air-toxicity models developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we estimated cancer and respiratory risks associated with pollution sources near each school. The fifth of the schools with the cleanest air were nearly 30% Anglo (in a school district that is less than 15% white), while the fifth with the most polluted air were 92% minority.

This disparity could simply be a function of other factors. For example, heavily minority schools tend to be located in older industrial areas. We therefore tried to control for factors usually associated with pollution: population density, the percentage of land zoned for industrial use, income levels and home ownership (often a sign of both political power and resident commitment to the neighborhood). Nevertheless, the racial make-up of the student body still played a significant role in predicting the environmental risks associated with a school.

Is this correlation simply a reflection of neighborhood demographics? After all, previous research indicates that Southern California’s most hazardous air pollutants, as well as its toxic storage and disposal facilities, are disproportionately concentrated in minority communities. To account for this, we reanalyzed our data to determine if a school was more or less minority than would have been predicted from the neighborhood in which it was situated. As it turns out the racial disparity persisted, with significantly higher cancer and respiratory risks from hazardous air pollutants in the schools with more minority students than would have been expected, given local demographics.

Do these persistent health disparities among Los Angeles schoolchildren have other effects? We examined the relationship between respiratory risks and school achievement, as measured by the Academic Performance Index. Even after accounting for the poverty levels of the students, their English language proficiency, the percentage of teachers with emergency credentials, the educations of parents and other standard predictors of academic achievement, air pollution had a negative and statistically significant effect on test scores.

The causal chain and biological mechanisms involved remain unclear, and detailed epidemiological work is necessary. But the apparent connection between pollution and impaired learning is troubling, given that many minority and low-income students already face academic challenges. Why put one more barrier in their way?

The LAUSD is slated to build 86 new schools in the next five years. With land scarce in the densely populated inner city, the district will have to consider areas once used for industrial uses. While tradeoffs may be necessary, the results of our study, coupled with the controversies generated by the sitings of the Belmont Learning Complex and a new South Gate high school, suggest that any proposed school location and construction plan take into account the vulnerability of children to environmental hazards.

When we see a pattern in which environmental hazards are disproportionately affecting minority children’s health and academic performance, we must ask: Who’s minding the kids?

by Carlos Porras

I am struck by some similarities.  We’re looking at some serious crisis in California, the economy is broken, the economic cost of one years cohort of high school dropouts was more than the state’s deficit at the end of last year ($46.4 billion cost/$42 billion deficit), the graduation rate of minority students is abysmal, in Huntington Park, Ca. 98% Latino, neighbor community to South Central Los Angeles I was told recently by the Assistant Police Chief that their High School, with a population of 4200 students, graduates less than 35%.

Latino students currently are the majority of students in public schools in California and the California Department of Finance projects Latino youth population to grow 164% by 2050 as compared to 4% for non Latino youth population.

So all this has led educators to despair at how to remedy the situation.  At the same time the state continues to cut school budgets, and which schools suffer the most?

So here we are at YSCal attempting to bring a proven model for student engagement to low income communities of color and provide some hope for these youth to share in the dream we call America.

We all know that education is the fundamental foundation for opportunity, equity and justice that begins to address these gaps in society, but we are faced with the some familiar challenges in addressing this crisis as what I faced in my last employment, RACE.  This is particularly poignant today as we witness the country’s first African American President.

In my last employment I went to work at an environmental organization at a time when the environmental movement was lamenting a retreat of influence over policy matters.  I went to work there not because of my passion for the physical environment and the issues of that movement, which ranged from preservation and conservation of wildlife and their habitats, not because I understood the issue of climate change, not for any of the usual attractions to the environmental activists of the day.

My concern was that the environment in communities of color was seriously harming the health of people in those communities and nobody seemed to care.  More so nobody seemed to believe it.  This was the emergence of what is now the environmental justice movement.

Now let me be clear the environmental movement was born out of an aristocratic noble class whose concern was the protection of the natural world for the benefit of their class, not for poor people much less people of color.

The environmental justice movement was the sudden and cataclysmic clash between two movements, the environmental movement and the civil rights movement.  The question of equity and equal protection were being raised.  And while it took environmentalists a disturbingly long time to acknowledge it and even longer to publicly endorse it, I don’t know how much it has truly changed the fabric of those organizations other than the rhetoric.

I recall when I started to do my community organizing in Huntington Park back in 1993, environmentalists telling me that low-income immigrants didn’t care about the environment and couldn’t be energized, mobilized and engaged on the environment.  Well that is probably true when you define the environmental issues as protecting the Spotted Owl, but when it came to protecting the health of their children that’s a different matter all together.

Which brings me back to schools.  The most compelling motivator for these communities was the environmental hazards posed at schools in the community.  A hazardous waste incinerator proposed and permitted across the street from the high school, an elementary school built on top of a superfund hazardous waste dump, a middle school that shared a chain link fence with a chrome-plater emitting hexavalent chromium, an elementary school within a hundred yards of three oil refineries, a community dissected by railroads and commercial transportation corridors and surrounded by freeways.  I was reminded of this by the following article that now gives validity to our concerns, check it out:

Veteran reporter Debra Viadero has written more than 1,400 stories for Education Week and most of them have been about research. Not bored yet, she translates, shares, and dissects research findings on schools and learning, along with news about education research, for audiences that extend far beyond the Ivory Tower.

« Study: Disadvantaged Babies Lag at the Starting Gate »
Smog Linked in New Study to Lower IQ Scores

The big research news this morning is a study being reported by the Associated Press that offers some strong evidence to suggest that smog can have a harmful effect on the developing brain.

The new findings come from a study of 249 children of New York City mothers that is being published this morning in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics.

As part of the study, mothers wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. By age 5, the children who had been exposed in utero to the highest levels of air pollution—most of it from car, bus and truck exhaust—scored an average of four to five points lower on IQ tests than children with less exposure. That’s a big enough difference, researchers say, to affect classroom performance.

These moms, all non-smokers, lived mostly in low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, but the researchers say that air pollution levels in those communities are typical of those for many large cities. Keep in mind, too, that the researchers adjusted for differences in children’s exposure to air pollutants in the years after they were born.

Are we looking at another possible cause of achievement gaps? More studies are needed to know for sure, but the researchers, in the meantime, will continue to track this group of children as they progress through school.

Now I raise the question, is the educational system stuck in the place where the environmental movement was back then?  I hear some familiarities in some of what is being said, “these parents are at fault,” “we don’t have the resources,” “its not about race it’s the economy,” “we need more research on school reforms that work.”
In the meantime we’re sitting here with a program that has proven success and can’t get funded to do the work.

Things that make you go hmmm.