ST. STEPHEN – Grade 10 students in the personal development and career planning class (PDCP) at St. Stephen High School learned about volunteerism and taking action last Thursday.
Teacher Jason Blokhuis invited Lydia Stubbert and her mother, Angela Stubbert, to speak to the class as an example of how people can make a plan, organize and motivate action. Lydia’s town clean up coincided with the beginning of both Earth Week and National Volunteer Week, and Blokhuis said it made sense to marry the cleanup with his PDCP class.
“One of the components of the course is community volunteering,” said Blokhuis.
In other provinces, like Ontario, high school students are required to complete a specified number of hours of volunteer community service to graduate. New Brunswick doesn’t have such a requirement. Students in the PDCP class are required to conceive a project and develop a plan of action, but don’t have to implement it.
“Lydia actually followed through. She actually made change happen,” Blokhuis said.
He said students sometimes have difficulty coming up with an idea they can develop a plan for, the ‘what can I do’ question.
The idea builds, he said, not necessarily from what one person can do, but what can a group of people do. Next comes evaluating how to get the message out to inform people and get more to participate.
His hope was that having a real example of someone who had seen a problem and acted would inspire the Grade 10 students to be able to complete their projects and help them overcome concerns about putting their hand up or that an idea may be viewed as silly.
“It takes a great deal of bravery to put yourself out there,” he said, noting Lydia worked around the obstacles she encountered to make her idea a reality.
Blokhuis said an objective of the PDCP program is to develop important skills that can serve students in their future schooling and work lives.
“As the name suggests, personal development and career planning,” said Blokhuis, who added helping instill some of the soft skills like communication, problem-solving and critical thinking are keys of the PDCP program.
In the 2023-24 school year, the class will move to the Grade 9 students from Grade 10.
“It felt good. I was a little bit nervous,” said Lydia of how she felt speaking to a class of older students. She hopes what she did will help inspire the high school students to come up with their own projects.
Lydia is already thinking about a cleanup for next year and what she may be able to do differently to get more people involved. Her mother said she wants Lydia to be the one making the decisions based on the information and options available.
Lydia said doubling the number of participants to 60 would make her happy and getting 100 would be even better.
“I was thinking starting in March with the clean up in April,” Lydia said, to allow people more time to plan and set aside the time.
“Twenty-six bags really made a difference with how much garbage was on the ground,” said Lydia.
“We could physically see the difference,” added Stubbert.
Lydia said she is still seeing less garbage on the ground but had a caution for people, too.
“I also feel like people are gonna keep on doing what they did. I might have to do it twice a year,” she said, to a round of laughter.
As Lydia and her mother were walking through the school to the classroom on Thursday, several students stopped to thank her and congratulate her on the project. Before she began her talk, students presented Lydia with 43 hand-written thank you cards.
“She read every one last night,” said Stubbert via a Facebook message Friday morning.
robertfisher@stcroixcourier.ca