Lucy Gellman Photo
Liv Streeter, Veena Scholandy, Batu Kayaarasi and Hugo Chung.
Liv Streeter measured out four cups of flour, two tablespoons of baking powder, a cup of sugar. Behind her, Hugo Chung carried half a cup of butter from the microwave to the table. Veena Scholandy was waiting patiently to mix the wet into the dry. The resultant blueberry muffins had to be ready — for their debut serving New Haven’s homeless population.
Streeter, Chung, and Scholandy were three of 480 students participating Thursday in The Foote School‘s first annual Service Learning Day, a collaboration between Foote’s entire student body, as well as 120 faculty and staff members, and 45 area organizations like the soup-kitchen-turned-Sunrise Cafe at St. Paul and St. James in Wooster Square.
After holding “Unite for Understanding” and “STEM and Tech” themed days last year, Foote Curriculum Coordinator Lauren Goldberg wanted to do something larger, that “makes everybody feel like we belong to the community.” She started brainstorming when she arrived at Foote four years ago from Massachusetts.
Batu Kayaarasi, David Carroll, Hugo Chung, Hanah Kim and Jack Meyers stuff packs.
What Goldberg came up with was turning the school’s annual Earth Day celebration into an event that extended to the world outside Foote’s Loomis Place campus. There would be environmentally themed activities that would resonate with Earth Day, she decided — student clean-up and landscaping crews at the Long Wharf Nature Preserve, Mill River, West River and Edgerton Park. She also gave students options like casserole baking for Columbus House, animal shelter service, volunteering for the Sunrise Cafe, sewing dresses for young women in Haiti, and reading aloud to students at Celentano Biotech, Health & Medical Magnet School, Foote’s sister school nearby on Canner Street.
“We’ve been trying to layer projects all over the place,” Goldberg said, pointing to a lesson on food insecurity at CitySeed, followed by a baking session in CitySeed’s kitchen to feed food-insecure women and girls. “This is about how much we are able to feel that we had an impact. We are a community at the school. But we also live in a community.”
Chung with finished packs.
One level below Foote’s sprawling library, a student group was assembling toiletry kits as well as baking blueberry muffins for guests at Sunrise Cafe. Working under Head of School Carol Maoz and Latin teacher Andrew Sweet, eight third-through-seventh graders transformed into an assembly line, grabbing single athletic socks and stuffing them with wet wipes, toothbrushes and toothpaste, tissues, and boxed bars of soap.
In a discussion with Liberty Community Services Director John Bradley earlier that day, Chung, a seventh-grader at Foote, said he’d learned for the first time that people affected by homelessness often live out of a backpack and don’t have access to basic paper goods, or a way to brush their teeth after a meal. Now, he’s seeing the big effect of small, portable toiletries, he said.
“People don’t think about it unless they have to,” said Streeter. With her group, she had spent the first hour of her school day preparing trays for guests at Sunrise Cafe, learning about their restaurant-esque approach. Sunrise differs from some of New Haven’s soup kitchens in that its staff serves guests, rather than having them line up cafeteria-style. “I’ve never really thought about how lucky you are to have food, and a family that loves you, and a house,” she said.
Hugo Chung and Batu Kayaarasi.
As toiletry kits were finished and laid out neatly on a table in one corner of the room, the group turned its attention toward baking blueberry muffins that would feed the 100 to 150 guests Sunrise Cafe expected to get the next morning. Splitting up into two groups, students once again became an orderly flurry of action, measuring out flour, butter, eggs, sugar, milk, baking soda, blueberries and a pinch of sea salt. As they mixed and scooped, fourth-grader Jack Meyer got an assist from Rufus McCleery and David Carroll as he lowered a spatula into the globby, blueberry batter. Scholandy had a similar assist from Streeter, and fifth-grader Batu Kayaarasi from Chung.
As the students sent tray after tray of muffins to the Foote oven, Kayaarasi went over the events of the morning. “It felt really good that I made someone happy,” he said.