Last week’s leadership column addressed strategic planning and invited our community to help inspire, influence, and inform the future of Belmont Day School. Next Friday, our students and faculty will engage in our annual Community Service Day, which also inspires, influences, and informs the future of our campus, our community, and our planet.
Both our strategic planning process and our community service work at Belmont Day are rooted in participation, action, tradition, and innovation.
Leading the way, as is often the case, are some of our youngest learners, our incredible pre-kindergartners, kindergartners, and first graders. Our kindergartners noticed this year that when they are outside for recess or heading out for a walk, they sometimes see trash on the ground. Inspired to act, their class has committed to spending part of Friday morning doing a campus clean-up. The pre-k and first grade classes will also be getting outside and doing their part to spread joy and beautify our environment. First graders will be planting flowers all over campus, and pre-k will be bringing plant cuttings in vases to share joy and beauty with the BDS community.
Our second graders will continue their yearlong work supporting Gaining Ground’s food assistance program by going to the farm and helping with planting, tending, and weeding. Started more than two decades ago, this partnership and learning process are vital to the second grade experience and are fundamental to the learning and living of our school’s values.
As they are known to do, our Labyrinth students in grades 3-5 will be mixing it up this year with three different service projects. Our tireless third graders will support the Jared Box Project by creating boxes for children in hospitals. Filled with small gifts, toys, games, crayons, coloring books, and other fun activities, the boxes support the Jared Box Project’s goal of bringing joy to children in a moment when they most need it.
Our fab fourth graders will build on the buzz started last year with our citizen science pollinators research by creating an awareness campaign around pollinators/bees. Our lower school leaders, aka our fifth graders, will again spread out across the Barn gym to hand-tie fleece blankets for donation to the Lowell Humane Society. The blankets (more than 50 made each year!) give comfort to animals as they too often recover from neglect and abuse and wait to be welcomed to new homes.
Our middle schoolers will meet the moment with a variety of service projects. Our tireless sixth graders will literally be all over the place, from the school garden and the woodshop to the theater department’s costume closet and the building and grounds garage, pitching in with unique projects in each location. Our seventh graders, who have been studying water systems all year in their science classes, will partner with the Mystic River Watershed to visit Torbert MacDonald Park in Medford for invasive plant removal and trash cleanup.
And last, but certainly not least, the Class of 2026 will take this time next Friday to serve future generations at Belmont Day by engaging directly in the strategic planning process. They will spend the morning in an interactive think tank session, charged with sharing their insights on BDS and their hopes for the school’s next 100 years.
Community Service Day is a whirlwind of activity, both on campus and off, that focuses our efforts on educating and inspiring caring and civic-minded citizens. As we look ahead to the joy of Belmont Day’s centennial and the challenge of a strategic planning process, we hope that our students’ efforts and leadership inspire all of us to serve our community, both locally and globally.