In mid-December, The Harker School’s lower school completed a service project that resulted in presents under the trees of many families who would not have otherwise been able to afford them. Joe Connolly, the dean of students K-5, said that while the massive toy drive at the lower school was a grade 4 service project, most of the lower school families donated a toy.
Grade 4 students went above and beyond by not only donating toys, but also counting the toys and loading them up for delivery. At the end of the project, 809 toys were delivered to Sacred Heart Community Services (SHCS) in San Jose.
As Connolly said in an email to lower school families, “The volunteers at SHCS were thrilled with the donation. Your donations went a long way towards helping them reach their goal of making sure that every child has a toy to enjoy.” Including Harker’s donation, more than 16,000 toys were donated, then set up and organized like a toy store for parents of children in need to choose from, resulting in a very merry Christmas day.
On Wed., Feb. 1, 2012, student-organized Kicks Against Cancer will again take place at Davis Field. At 3:30 p.m., The Harker School’s girls varsity soccer team will be facing off against Immaculate Conception Academy, followed by the varsity boys soccer game against Eastside College Prep. The event will once again help raise money for Camp Okizu, the camp program for young cancer patients and survivors. Last year’s event raised nearly $8,000, an amount that organizers hope to surpass this year.
Starting mid-January, T-shirts and wristbands will be sold during lunchtime to raise money for the event. Donations are also being accepted, and can be arranged by contacting girls soccer coach Jason Berry at jasonb@harker.org.
Returning this year is the popular halftime activity “Butts Up,” in which attendees can donate money for a chance to hit a teacher in the posterior with a soccer ball. Prizes will also be raffled during both games.
In mid-December, the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) at Stanford University sent over an art curation and interior design team to select art to display in different parts of the hospital.
The Harker School’s lower school art department has had students involved in displaying art at the hospital for several years, ever since Eric Hoffman, lower school art department chair K-5, asked his students for suggestions on where their art could be displayed back in 2008. Hoffman contacted LPCH on a student’s suggestion, and after months of planning with Susan Gray, administrative project manager at the hospital, and display specialist Ted Cohen, student works premiered in spring 2009.
The art is switched out occasionally, and the team from LPCH came to Harker to select the newest pieces. “We had displayed everything in the conference room at the lower school campus, and when they came in, they were truly surprised, and very, very happy,” said Hoffman of the team’s visit. “This particular ceramics project is one we’ve been developing for about a year.”
The grade 4 art students made ceramic desserts as part of this year’s art curriculum, and the LPCH team thought they looked good enough to eat. The students did, too. According to Hoffman, his morning classes had been working on decorating their ceramic pieces, and there was a whole table full of them when the afternoon class came in.
“They thought it was the best thing they’d ever seen,” Hoffman said. They even asked who had done the pieces, and Hoffman told them that they had – this was the work of their classmates, and their pieces were looking just as great. Part of the LPCH’s team’s visit also involved a discussion of LPCH’s expansion – the hospital is going to have more wall space, and the team is rethinking where and how to display artwork.
The ceramics dessert project the grade 4 students did inspired some spur-of-the-moment brainstorming. “Normally we display our 3-D work there for a year or so, and when they saw this dessert project, they started playing with the idea of taking it and putting it on permanent display in the cafeteria,” Hoffman said, something the team had not intended on when they first arrived at the school.
For the new wall space in LPCH’s clinic, the team also selected about 45 pieces of flatwork. Looking toward the future, Hoffman believes they will “absolutely be involved” with the project five years from now and beyond. “Giving to our community is so important,” he said. “I don’t know a better way to do that than to make people laugh and smile. Especially in a hospital situation.”
Silicon Valley Philanthropy Day is an annual event with awards presented by the Association of Fundraising Professionals Silicon Valley Chapter (AFP SVC) at a luncheon in mid-November to prominent individuals and organizations for their contributions to the community. This year, the event was held at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, and 11 students from Harker were honored with awards for their work with the Pacific Autism Center for Education’s Youth Leadership Committee (PACE YLC). As PACE puts it, their mission is, “to provide high quality programs for individuals with Autism and its related developmental disabilities, so they may experience the satisfaction and fulfillment that come from learning, self-care, productive work, and interpersonal and community experiences.” The aim is to one day be the world leader in connecting a full range of services for persons with autism.
Of the 25 motivated high school students in the group, nearly half are from Harker, including: Jackie Jin, Isha Kawatra, Divya Sarathy and Jennie Xu, grade 12; Emily Chu, Kevin Lin, Isha Patnaik, Indulaxmi Seeni, Pranav Sharma, Apri Tang and Joseph Wang, all grade 11. Over the past two years, the group has raised more than $15,000 through various fundraisers, and this year they’re leading an anti-bullying seminar at local middle schools to talk about awareness and acceptance of students with disabilities.
The Harker School’s annual Global Empowerment and Outreach (GEO) Week, put on by the GEO Club, ended in late October. Thanks to candygram, wrist bands and sports bags sales, as well as pledges taken for vows of silence, the club will be donating just under $6,000 to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI). GAVI distributes vaccines to impoverished nations, helping to save the lives of children and break the poverty cycle.
GEO had so many candygram orders that “we had to make almost 200 more, I think,” said Cherry Xie, grade 12, the club’s public relations officer.
Xie also says a great number of people participated in the vow of silence, which was her personal favorite part of the week. “People got very competitive about the amount of money they could raise and it basically turned into a huge competition between me and two other people to see who could raise the most.” Pledges were given to those participating in the 24-hour vow of silence, and the three competitive students, “each ended up getting pledges from 60 or more people,” said Xie.
But the vows of silence didn’t stop with the students. Teachers also took the pledge challenge, including Bradley Stoll, a mathematics teacher on the upper school campus who teaches Xie’s calculus class.
Xie called thought it was “very bold” of him to do. “I really admire how he was willing to root for the cause even though it made teaching for him very difficult,” she says.
To illustrate just how quickly disease spreads, the club also put on a game where they had to “infect” each other with stickers, and see how many people had become “infected” by the end of the day.
The end of the event provided a natural time for reflection, as well as a time to consider what other ways there are to help. “I hope everyone realizes that there are many ways to help people in Third World countries, and that many aspects of their lives they don’t usually take time to appreciate are in fact life-or-death matters for others, specifically vaccinations and immunizations,” said Xie. “I also hope that people who did take the vow of silence reflect on how much of a difference they made by themselves, just by giving up something as simple as speech for a while, and that if we all support each other in fighting for a cause, we can achieve a lot.”
The Harker School’s grade 2 students had their annual pumpkin painting and delivery in late October, a community service project that the school has been taking part in for the last seven years. A discussion about community is a big part of the project. According to Paula Bither, a lower school P.E. instructor, it gives the students a chance to talk about “what a community is.” Bither says the conversation led them to discuss “how we live in a neighborhood that is part of the school’s community. We talked about how challenging it is to live near a school with all its various noises.” Toward that end, it is important to be a good neighbor, and to show appreciation toward the wonderful neighbors the school has. The students decorated pumpkins, and then walked around the neighborhood, delivering pumpkins on porches along with cards. “The pumpkin is a gift to show our appreciation,” says Bither. “We want to thank our neighbors for being so great.”
From the moment you wake up in the morning until you drift off to sleep at night, you’ll face about 26 adversities, ranging from petty annoyances to major setbacks, according to Dr. Paul Stoltz, president and CEO of Peak Learning Inc., who recently visited The Harker School as part of the Common Ground Speaker Series. Witty and engaging, Stoltz captivated the audience gathered at Nichols Hall with examples of resilience to adversities in his personal life.
A decade ago, Stoltz coined the term “Adversity Quotient,” or AQ, to describe the science of human resilience. To have a successful AQ is to perform optimally in the face of adversity. A person with low AQ, on the other hand, would be the first to burn out. Adversity, Stoltz said, “both destroys and elevates, strangles and sparks life.” Some people with high AQ can actually cause more adversity than they harness. Stoltz believes many are afraid of failures because their parents have been so lovingly protective and have done their best in removing every fathomable adversity.
Stoltz went on to identify the three types of AQ people: climbers, quitters and campers. High AQ climbers seek challenge, low AQ quitters flee from it and moderate AQ campers, which Stoltz said make up about 80 percent of the work force, are content and happy, stuck in the status quo.
Going hand-in-hand with AQ is Response Ability. This term for the response when adversity strikes is the key to building and developing resilience. When employers worldwide were asked which they would prefer, a person with great talent but low resilience, or a person with exceptional resilience but low talent, almost 90 percent picked resilience. This is because they believe “highly resilient people will find a way to figure out how to learn to do what they have to do whereas those lacking resilience will join the throngs of great talent gone to waste,” Stoltz explained.
For those of us who are concerned with our response when faced with adversity, it is comforting to know that people can improve their resilience and, in turn, improve their performance.
Stoltz said that if we think of any person we consider great, that person has overcome adversity along the way – we can’t unleash the greatness in ourselves without adversity. We are all “hardwired” to react differently to adversity, but unlike IQ, it’s possible to improve AQ.
Stoltz then talked about the importance of developing what he calls the 3G mindset, which is broken into, “global, good and grit.” Global he defines as an openness and connectivity to the greater world; good, as may be expected, refers to integrity and kindness; and grit relates to toughness and tenacity.
“You can’t necessarily control what happens but if you can master how you respond to what happens, you can craft your destiny. So if adversity is harnessed with superior resilience, it could be the fuel cell of your success,” said Stoltz.
On a Saturday in mid-October, students and teachers from The Harker School’s lower school campus participated in the Walk ‘n’ Wag, a charity walk for the Humane Society of Silicon Valley that encourages people and their dogs to come together for a mile-long walk through Kelley Park.
This is the second year that the lower school has participated in the event, and Rita Stone, grade 1 teacher, said she hopes it becomes an annual event. “It started last year as an introduction/kickoff for the first grade community service project, which was raising supplies and funds for an animal shelter,” she says. This year, 10 students and eight staff members participated. “We even had some faculty with no dog, but a lot of spirit and enthusiasm,” says Stone. One student, Arissa Huda, a first grader in Cindy Proctor’s class, participated in the walk, and said she liked it when she fed one of the canine companions, Wiggin, “a little treat.”
Stone says she presented the idea to the class by first talking about animal shelters, and telling the students how they always need help.
After the walk, Dalya Tanurhan, a student in Stone’s class said, “I was so happy!”
Shalini Bhatia, a grade 1 student in Proctor’s class, said, “I wish the walk had been longer! It was too short.”
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Hotel Toiletries Gathered for Homeless
Pat White, middle school history teacher, has again led a collection of donations of hotel toiletries for the Georgia Travis Center for homeless women and children in San Jose. White’s group last donated 210 individual plastic bags of soap, shampoo and other personal care products for individual use in June, and this fall were well on their way to reaching that level at press time.“Thank you so much for your generosity,” said White.
Mother/Daughter Teams in Relay for Life
Michelle Douglas and Amy Wardenburg, 11, created a mother/daughter team for the American Cancer Society Relay for Life held July 9-10 in Campbell. The pair’s lives have been impacted by cancer and they were inspired to create a team to help fight it. For the past four years, Douglas and Wardenburg have volunteered at the Campbell Relay for Life. This year, along with their mothers, Chris and Heather, they were joined by fellow 2013 classmates and their mothers Cristina and Helena Jerney, Cecilia and Laura Lang-Ree, Hannah and Sue Prutton, and Molly and Roni Wolfe. Lang-Ree is chair of the performing arts department at Harker and Prutton is director of upper school volunteer programs. The team walked for 24 hours and raised $4,000.
Senior Raises Funds for Propionic Acidemia
Maya Gattupalli, grade 12, organized a fundraiser in August for the Propionic Acidemia Foundation and invited the Class of 2012 to participate. The event was a 5K walk in Vasona Park in Los Gatos on Aug. 14. “Nine other Harker seniors volunteered at the event,” said Gattupalli. “We had about 83 people attend the walk and we raised $5,256 (and therefore reached our goal of raising 5K).” Propionic acidemia, a recessive genetic disorder affecting one in every 100,000 people in the U.S., is characterized by a nonfunctioning enzyme used in the digestive process, leaving those afflicted unable to break down certain proteins and fats. This leads to the build-up of toxins and acids, which can cause organ dysfunction.
Cyrus Merrill’s grade 6 advisory recently stepped up their Kiva loans efforts, adding to their roster of lendees a jewelry maker in Peru, a Kenyan timber salesman, an artist in the Philippines and a farmer in Tajikistan. Merrill said he expects the group to be able to lend more money in the near future. To date, three of their nine loans have been paid back in full, with one 82 percenet repaid and another 76 percent repaid.