Over the holiday season, middle school students worked hard to collect gifts for Family Giving Tree, delivering 350 gifts to the organization. With the help of Harker’s students, Family Giving Tree was able to distribute more than 76,000 gifts during the 2016 holiday season, surpassing the organization’s goal for the drive.
“I am extremely proud of all our students, families and staff that go over and beyond in the spirit of giving,” said middle school BEST director Lorena Martinez. The goal for the 2017 holiday drive is 400 gifts.
Started as an MBA project in 1990, Family Giving Tree seeks to alleviate Bay Area poverty by organizing major giving drives every year. The annual Holiday Wish Drive works to fulfill holiday gift requests for low-income households, and the Back-to-School Drive provides backpacks with school supplies to tens of thousands of K-12 students.
Junior Anooshree Sengupta recently led her first WonderBots! program, which she spearheaded to foster interest in technology among local girls in grades 5-8. Designed by Sengupta and Harker computer science chair Eric Nelson, WonderBots! was supported by a grant from AspireIT, an outreach program organized by the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Sengupta won an Aspirations in Computing Award from NCWIT in March 2016.
“The program just concluded, and was very successful, with 80 girls applying for 20 spots,” Sengupta said. Eight two-hour classes were held from October through early December at the West Valley branch of the San Jose Public Library. Attendees engaged with technology by learning how to build and program robots following the CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) Lego Robotics curriculum.
Sengupta hopes to encourage more interest in technology among girls, who account for more than half of all AP test-takers and nearly half of all students taking AP Calculus exams. By contrast, girls make up only 22 percent of AP computer science test-takers, a number that Sengupta aspires to increase with the WonderBots! program.
The success of the initial program has motivated Sengupta to consider expanding the next series of classes to more branches in the San Jose Public Library system this year.
Harker teacher and Green Team member Diana Moss and her son Kevin Moss ’14, along with sisters Anika Banga, grade 11, and Anvi Banga, grade 9, and their dad, Gaurav, helped pick up some seriously nasty stuff by the roadway over the break. As part of a large group effort that included students from other schools, the Harker team cleaned up the Southwest Expressway-Meridian Avenue interchange, filling 12 bags in just over two hours, according to the Adopt-A-Highway organizer. Go Harker Green Team!
Grade 4 students came up big yet again in this year’s holiday toy drive, collecting a whopping 572 toys for St. Justin’s Community Outreach in Santa Clara, ensuring that many families in need will have a brighter holiday season. According to elementary division head Kristin Giammona, the staff at St. Justin’s is currently sorting through the toys, which will be available for families to pick up next week. Nice work!
Earlier this month, grade 6 parents pitched in to put together holiday dinner baskets for LifeMoves, a local organization dedicated to helping homeless individuals and families transition to stable housing.
“Participating families were asked to donate $10 towards the project,” said Harker parent Shuba Gautham (Samvita, grade 6, and Satvika, grade 4). “We had committed for 10 baskets, but collected enough for 17 baskets. We plan to use the remaining money for another food drive in spring.”
In early December, families went shopping to purchase the items for the baskets. They later gathered to create the baskets, which will be delivered to the LifeMoves shelter next week.
In November, Harker’s Green Team – an upper school organization that promotes sustainability and awareness of environmental issues – held a clothing drive to benefit Sacred Heart Community Service and Empowering World Change. Green Team member Kunal Bhandarkar, grade 11, said about eight to 10 large bags full of clothes were donated. “The clothing donation drive was started to give people who need clothes something warm and comfortable to wear as the days get increasingly colder,” he said.
Middle school students also got involved in the effort, as the advisories of science teacher Raji Swaminathan, Japanese teacher Kumi Matsui and English teacher Rebecca Williams contributed at least three more large bags of clothes.
Seventeen students and four teachers from Harker’s upper school joined about 40 other concerned citizens to remove litter from San Jose’s Guadalupe River Trail on Oct. 15.
Armed with heavy gloves, litter sticks and garbage bags, workers started the cleanup at the Coleman Avenue intersection of the trail and continued northwestward to the Taylor Street overpass.
Ricky Davis, volunteer coordinator of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy, estimated 2,000 pounds of garbage were gathered on that Saturday morning. AP Environmental Science teacher Jeff Sutton noted that the next day’s rainstorm would have washed much of that trash into the San Francisco Bay about 8 miles north had it not been collected.
The cleanup tackled one of the most heavily used portions of the trail adjacent to the Guadalupe River Park, which includes the Heritage Rose Garden and Historic Orchard. Students learned firsthand the difficulties of maintaining valuable green space amid urban centers. Despite the obstacles, Christine Tang, grade 9, thinks such work is necessary. Parks and trails “give us a little piece of nature where we can relax and stop off to breathe in fresh air,” she observed.
Harker teams divided cleanup efforts on both sides of the trail, some veering west toward the large city park and others traveling on the east side of the running path near the river’s edge. Both groups encountered debris left by trail users as well as San Jose’s homeless population. As such, the volunteer effort was about more than just litter. Regarding her work collecting trash from no-longer-occupied homeless camps, Green Team vice president Satchi Thockchom commented that non-homeless “produce just as much if not more waste than the homeless people. We just have the fortune of taking out the trash every week and never having to deal with it again.”
Last week’s work was the first of four community service opportunities coordinated by the Green Team, the upper school environmental club, and activities coordinator Kerry Enzensperger. Upcoming efforts will include planting trees with Our City Trees on Nov. 12 and maintaining native plant species at Don Edward National Wildlife Refuge on Feb. 25.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2016 Harker Quarterly.
This past spring, two of Harker’s popular outreach efforts, the middle school’s annual Cancer Walk and the upper school’s Kicks Against Cancer event, raised money for the same cause: Camp Okizu. The 10th annual Harker Cancer Walk raised about $14,000, while Kicks Against Cancer raised $1,500, for a total of $15,500.
The funds from both events benefited Camp Oziku, a nonprofit organization that allows children with cancer to “just be a kid for a week.” Located in the Berry Creek area of the Sierra foothills, Camp Okizu offers a free weeklong summer camp that gives cancer patients and their families a sense of normalcy and stability.
Students, parents, family members, faculty and staff from all four campuses gathered at the middle school field on March 22 for the Cancer Walk. “This time was a bit more special as it was our 10th anniversary celebration walk!” said Michael Schmidt, middle school computer science teacher and department chair.
Schmidt had the idea for the walk following the passing of his own mother due to cancer. “This is an event that Harker was kind enough to let me start in 2007 in honor of loved ones afflicted with cancer,” he continued. “Since then, it has been used as a moment for our entire community to come together and celebrate the lives of those we love and those we’ve lost. It is a symbolic walk that is measured not by the miles covered, but by the love and understanding between us all.”
Prior to the walk, students engaged in various activities to learn about different forms of cancer and cancer prevention strategies. In a further show of support, many teachers displayed door decorations with themes designed to promote cancer awareness.
And during the walk, honor flags – honoring someone who is fighting or has fought cancer – were placed in the ground along the inner edge of the field’s walking path.
Meanwhile, although the upper school’s soccer teams lost this year’s Kicks Against Cancer games to Menlo High School, Harker students were still excited over the real winner of the event – Camp Okizu. The seventh-annual soccer match took place on Feb. 5, with the junior varsity boys, varsity girls and varsity boys playing against their respective Menlo High School teams. The JV boys lost 0-2, the varsity girls lost 0-3 and the varsity boys lost 1-4.
Sparsh Chauhan, grade 10, scored the only goal for Harker during the last game of the night. After the JV boys finished their game, the varsity girls team presented a check for funds raised to four visiting Camp Okizu families. To help raise money for the camp, Kicks Against Cancer onlookers had the opportunity to buy T-shirts and wristbands, make monetary donations and purchase yummy treats at a bake sale.
During halftime of the last game, spectators were given a chance to play “Butts Up” with some faculty members lined up on the goal line. Cheerleaders, meanwhile, performed a special routine. Be sure to check the Harker News website at http://news.harker. org/tag/outreach for more Greater Good stories.
Sixth graders gathered in the MPR in mid-September to write letters of thanks to servicemen and servicewomen to be included in packages from Operation Gratitude. About 80 students RSVP’d to the event; a half hour in, the tables were full of chattering girls and boys. The letters will be inserted into packages of goodies and sundries, and then forwarded to service personnel who are far from their families during the holidays. The effort was coordinated by the grade level coordinators for grade 6.
Over the summer, Harker juniors Divija Bhimaraju, Emily Chen, Peter Connors and Sameep Mangat spent a few days at the annual Hugh O’Brian Youth (HOBY) Leadership Seminar. These events, held throughout the country, are designed to help high school students build leadership skills through various activities. Students attend the seminars after being nominated by their school.
One of Chen’s favorite activities was an ice cream-themed game that demonstrated societal class structure. Teams were separated into three different “flavors” and planned cities with resources provided to them. The purpose of the exercise was to show how social change was necessary to curb social stratification.
“Strawberry members were allowed to play loose with the rules without fear of punishment and were provided with the best building materials and media presence; Mint was treated averagely throughout the entire game; and Vanilla was thoroughly abused,” Chen recalled. “Vanilla members frequently went to ‘jail’ for transgressions such as wearing denim, talking too loudly, talking too quietly and pretty much for existing. The media demonized Vanilla as much as it lauded Strawberry.”
Mangat particularly enjoyed the HOBY Hugs activity, in which attendees exchange gifts of candy and nice messages. “The message usually is [about] how that person impacted you in a positive way, and how much you appreciate their friendship,” she said. “Reading those in the car ride home put a smile on my face as I sobbed. I didn’t expect for these people to impact me in such a strong way, yet when I left, I could feel the loss deep in my heart.”
Another highlight was the appearance by speaker Jamie Utt, a highly regarded presenter on diversity and inclusion, who spoke about “breaking down walls of negativity and how we’ve become socially conditioned to view people and constructs in pejorative manners,” said Chen. “Jamie gave a charged speech following a powerful activity about internalization of prejudice and what we can do to combat systemic antagonism.”
Chen and Mangat both enthusiastically recommended that students attend a HOBY seminar if given the opportunity. “It’s a life-changing experience, and there’s no other way I can put it,” Mangat said. “The people that you meet, the interactions that you have, and the lessons that you learn change the way that you view the world around you and it re-energizes you in a way that nothing else ever could.”
The team members Chen met and bonded with at the event helped make the event special for her. “They’ll have your back, because this is a diverse collection of the region’s future leaders, and you’ll learn so much about humanity and the difference youth can make in the present and in the future.”