Building community, both within Blue Oak School and beyond, is essential to the School’s mission.
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Through their studies and community outreach activities, Blue Oak School students explore what it means to be stewards of their immediate communities, as well as the wider regional and world communities to which we all belong. Both human and environmental needs are addressed in this context.
One way students gain a better understanding of stewardship is through working with local community organizations with which Blue Oak School has partnered. Such partnerships give students the opportunity to practice community service in a meaningful and relevant way, while also connecting the School with the wider community.
The following are some of the outreach programs in which Blue Oak School students have participated in the Napa area:
Clinic Ole
Since 2005, Blue Oak Middle School students have participated in the Reach Out and Read® (ROR) program at Clinic Ole. A national non-profit organization, ROR is working to make literacy promotion a standard part of pediatric primary care, so that children grow up with books and a love of reading. The program trains doctors and nurses to advise parents about the importance of reading aloud and to give books to children at pediatric check-ups. Each week, two to four Blue Oak Middle School students travel to the clinic during their Spanish language class to read to children in Spanish and support this literacy initiative. In the words of one BOS seventh grader, “I love volunteering at Clinic Ole because giving kids a chance to read feels amazing.” A grant from the Gasser Foundation allows Blue Oak School students to give the book they have read to the young child.
Napa Valley Food Bank
Each year, Blue Oak School sponsors a holiday food drive for the Napa Valley Food Bank. Last year, in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, Blue Oak School students, faculty, staff and parents collected over 1,000 pounds of non-perishable food items for the food bank. Different grade levels also sponsor food drives during the course of the year. In 2008, first and fifth graders collected foodstuffs in celebration of Valentine’s Day. The children filled up their wagons and personally delivered the food to the Napa Valley Food Bank.
Fuller Park Head Start
In 2007, Blue Oak School’s fifth grade class began volunteering with the Fuller Park Head Start in Napa. The longest-running, national school-readiness program in the United States, Head Start provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. Early literacy skills are a major focus of Head Start programs like the one at Fuller Park.
Every other week, three to four Blue Oak School fifth graders spend an hour with the preschool-aged children at Head Start, reading books designed to strengthen phonetic skills. They also play bilingual board games to increase vocabulary and improve bilingual comprehension. Lisa Colarusso, Site Supervisor at the Fuller Park Head Start, is happy with the way the program benefits everyone involved. “It gives a lot of verbal and social opportunity to improve language skills,” she says, “for both the preschoolers and the Blue Oak School students.”
STRAW Project
Since 2006, Blue Oak School has partnered with the Bay Institute’s STRAW Project to restore local watersheds. STRAW, which stands for Students and Teachers Restoring A Watershed, works with a network of teachers, students, restoration specialists and other community members to plan and implement watershed studies and restoration projects in the counties of Marin, Sonoma, and recently Napa. Each year, Blue Oak School students give back to the community by helping restore watersheds in the Napa Valley area. The positive impact the student work has on local watersheds also positively impacts the larger community of the San Francisco Bay area, teaching students that their efforts can truly make a difference.