My+Community+Service+Project

Generation Citizen Community Service Learning Project. Examples: - Picture of a flyer YOU Created - Electronic Flyer YOU created - A Question YOU came up with for a survey - An e-mail you sent to__ about the project - A copy of the speech you gave - A short video of you working on something (I have cameras) - A few sentences documenting what you did in class that you think is significant - A transcript of a conversation you had with another class member that shows participation and engagement
 * 1) Evidence of YOUR work on the Project: should include EVERYthing you have Personally worked on to complete the project**

April 27, 2011

On this day the class split into to separate groups, A documentary group and a group that would be discussing polls to ask to ask other students. I joined the documentary group. We discussed and brainstormed certain ideas for what to include in the documentary. We came up with a plan as to what goals we wanted the documentary to accomplish.

This is the plan we came up with:

Our purpose was to "To inform the Malden community about how the budget cuts are affecting Malden Public Schools and how officials, teachers, and kids feel about the cuts. The documentary is also use for lobbying." We wanted our audience to range from the Malden community and its students and local officials to state level officials. Thesis: Budget cuts are affecting the Malden Public School's system negatively. The documentary will be about the changes over the past 3 years. Focus mostly on elective teachers. Colored = important people, people who can give us more information about the budget cuts.
 * Who to interview:**
 * Iovino : need to ask permission to be film
 * Judi Allen : need to ask permission to be film
 * Sid Smith
 * Mr. Brown
 * House Principals
 * Ms. Ceppetelli: health
 * Ms. Kwong: math teacher
 * Mr. Cole: chorus
 * Mr. Taveres: band
 * Ms. Fine/ Ms. Seager: art
 * Mr. Walsh: english
 * Ms. Day: knows a lot about the teacher union
 * Mr. Abetessa: special education
 * Ms. Razzieno: business

__**Information from Ms.Kilbansky:**__ The last 8 years: **__ $178,000 __** for supplies, transportation, supplementary, and adminastrative assistant. __**2011 = $47,000**__ In the last 15 years:
 * 14 postitions were cut in MHS.
 * 10 teachers
 * 4 power professionals
 * Cuts were not drastic.
 * students to teacher ratio goes up
 * instead of cutting teachers, they cut supplies.

Since Mr.Brown was in this term the enrollment went up.


 * May And June 2011**

In The course of these two months I have done the following:
 * I along with Wesley Liao formulated questions to ask Mr Brown and Ms Klibansky.
 * Interviewed Ms. Klibansky who is house principal of the Jenkins House
 * I interviewed Mr. Tavares band director along with Danny Yu and Wesley Liao. We also made the two questions that he answered
 * I briefly stayed after to help with editing the documentary (about 35 min)
 * Contributed to the making of the storyline for the documentary

__**One Reflection:**__

I am very pleased that my class has chosen to do The Malden Budget Cuts as their community service project. I have learned a lot about the way a budget works and how the schools are wired and worked. I am very happy to have found out how the city deals cutting programs and such from the city. They look to every other program/ activity they can before actually looking to cut teachers. I am also happy and interested that we will be doing a documentary for this project. I'm still wondering about how we are going to shoot the video but i have high hopes for it.

I think that a documentary would be a great way to get peoples opinions about the Malden School Budget out there and to also get other people to know and care about it.I hope that we will be able to interview some teaachers and students to get other opinions and history about the budget. The only thing we really haven't done for our project is propose an actual permanent fix for the budget cuts so that the budget may remain stable for years to come. I think that besides this little obstacle, our community service project is very successful.

__**Final Reflection:**__

First I would like to start off with saying that this has been a very fun and educating year in US history. The community service project that we worked on was like a roller coaster. It had it's ups and It had it's downs. Some of the ups are we got involved in making a change in our community, it was a nice way to learn about political strategies to convince local and national leaders, and I got to experience how it is to be part of a group. Some of the downs to this project were that it took away from our class time which resulted in us not finishing this years curriculum, and not everybody was involved as others which resulted in slow progress throughout this project. I think for the future such projects should not be too etravagant so that there still be time for school work.

In my mind this project is very controversial. I'm glad that my class got a chance to take part in such a project but at the same time I'm a little bit disappointed that I along with my classmates did not complete the full US History I curriculum. There is no specific person to blame for this problem.It would have been better if we had worked on the project more out of school this way we would have more school time to focus on the curriculum. Also if we had started the community service project a little earlier in the school year maybe we would have more time to focus on putting finishing touches to it while finishing the history materials.

I also feel as if some of my classmates quickly lost interest in our project. At first everyone was for it but as they began to realize how much work it was going to be and how little time we had to do it, they sort of panicked and began not to care. This also contributes to us not totally reaching the goal of our project, although I am glad that we finished the documentary because i was worrying that we would not finish it. Also a lot of our classmates were not willing to give up their time after school to work on the project; but at the same time, we as a class did not start working on the project after school until the end of the school year. This was poor planning on our part. If we gave it more time after school instead of in class we would have gotten more done and would have covered more of the curriculum.

To conclude, the Generation Citizen community service project was sort of successful. We might have not done the best we could with handling the project and school work but at least we have learned from our mistakes. Having said this, we should make sure that in the future we plan better with how to carry out school work and school projects so that we can prevent ever being put in such a position ever again. I am glad that I took part in Generation Citizen and that I have learned a valuable lesson from my community service project, but my best recommendation for incorporating Generation Citizen into Malden High classes would be to not do it in the future especially if the project gets to elaborate. I feel that there are other ways to reach out about community problems like getting more people than just a class worth amount to participate in fixing a problem. This way the project would be finished faster and there would be more input. Also there would be more class time to cover the curriculum topics.