Volunteerism blooms in Spring Term

WINFIELD — For five days each spring, Winfield-Mt. Union students embark on unique adventures immersing themselves into projects of their choosing during Spring Term.

According to the Spring Term Course Guide, WMU enacts Spring Term to encourage passion-driven learning, community and civic engagement, career exploration, and social and emotional growth.

The WMU team also hopes to cultivate essential 21st century skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity through Spring Term.

Students also learn about building networks in and outside of school along with forming a community of practice.

Students receive a course catalog which they use to pick their study area for the week. The catalog contains a fun name for each Spring Term course and a brief description.

“We don't want them to know which teachers are necessarily leading it because we want them to pick spring terms based on what they're interested in and not who they just maybe want to hang out with,” WMU Science teacher Shawna McCabe said. “That way they can find out if they have other interests with teach that maybe they'd never realized they had an interest with.”

McCabe, along with other WMU teachers, took the lead for a volunteer oriented Spring Term course named, “See a Need, Take the Lead.”

“I signed up for ‘See a Need, Take the Lead,’ because I wanted to do the volunteer work to help out in the community that's helped us so much so that we were giving back to the people that have given so much to our school and our activities in the school,” Senior Keely Malone.

McCabe’s Spring Term class is already showing their community engagement and growth socially and emotionally as they help not only the community in which they live, but also communities nearby by answering the question, “How can we impact people beyond ourselves?”

Some of the students signed up for the “See A Need, Take the Lead,” Spring Term course jumped into action helping with storm cleanup around Mediapolis.

According to the National Weather Service, a total of 20-30 tornadoes struck many communities in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois late Friday afternoon and into the evening, including the Mediapolis.

The National Weather Service categorized the tornado which struck Mediapolis as an EF2.

“Since Mediapolis is a close school to us, and a couple of our associates live near there or have friends that work there, and teachers have friends that work there we decided that we would take part of our group over yesterday morning and help out where we could,” McCabe said. “We ended up hauling, I think, ten loads of tree pieces and large to their dump site that the city was also helping with.”

See a Need, Take the Lead found many other ways to serve the community.

Friday, they placed food drive bags on doors across Winfield, picked up the donations Wednesday morning, and will delivered the donations to the food pantry last Thursday morning.

“When they had finished, they had the back of Mrs. McCabe’s pickup truck full, a total of 1,104 cans of food!” Cathy Lauderdale, a food pantry spokesperson, said. “Thank you to this wonderful bunch of kids and their teachers.”

According to McCabe, half of the group also went to Mt. Pleasant Tuesday to gather Winfield’s portion of a food delivery for the pantry at the Fellowship Cup.

“It was nice to do that because the people that run the food pantry are older, so they kind of have troubles, and it's, like, a lot of food,” Malone said. “So, it was a good feeling be able to help them so that they don't have to strain their bodies even more with all the heavy food that they usually have to load. So I'm glad that we could take that burden off them.”

“Plus, the food pantry here in Winfield has a new site that they're opening so they won't have to use the basement of the church,” McCabe said. “It's actually the old Beacon office.”

“So some of our boys went over there this week and hauled a bunch of old heavy junk up out of the basement for the men who are working over there,” she added.

The group also cleaned up two large yards in Winfield.

“We hauled probably, I think, six to 10 loads of leaves and sticks to our city dump site for them,” McCabe said.

“I really like to do that one just because some people don't have the ability to do it and it does look nice when it’s done and when you help,” eighth-grader Suttyn Schlee said.

Other service projects from this Spring Term course include a group of four girls that volunteer all day in the elementary classrooms, sorting photos at the museum and spending time with residents at the local care facility.

“We went to the nursing home and took some residents for a walk and then sang karaoke with them and played games with them,” McCabe said.

Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com