What's Happening in Cougar Country

One of the Lake Catholic core values is “a willingness to serve.” The sign that you see when you leave the school parking lot reads “Exit to Serve.” All students must complete 50 hours of service to graduate and have 80 hours to qualify to wear the Service Cord at commencement.

Service is woven throughout the fabric of the Lake Catholic school year – service projects on and off campus, Turkey Day, Meal Ministry, Pallbearer Ministry, and the list goes on and on.

Service-learning, though, is another form of service – one that second-year art teacher Carolina Kane hopes to bring more of to her classes with the hope that it spreads throughout the school.

“I’m trying to bring service-learning into what I do in my classroom,” Kane said. “It’s actually a goal of mine. I want it to be incorporated into my curriculum. It’s what I did when I worked at John Carroll, and I want to bring that type of service here.”

Service-learning is more than just a beach cleanup, raking leaves, or shoveling a driveway – although all of those things are important. Service-learning incorporates the learning aspect of the classroom with the service. 

So, although Kane’s Art Foundations class and the Art Club seemingly just made Valentine’s Day cards, there was more to it than that.

“We did these before Thanksgiving, so it was one of the first actual design projects we did,” Kane said. “But it was more than making the cards. It was how they interacted with the card. How did the paper feel in their hands? What colors made sense to use? What font and font sizes made the most sense for this project?”

Although it was a real classroom lesson and project for Kane and her students, the service part of it will have a much broader reach.

As a school, nearly 100 cards were donated to the Lake County Council on Aging’s Meals on Wheels program to be delivered on Valentine’s Day. In total, from nine schools, more than 1,400 cards were collected for distribution.

“When people receive these cards, most of them are just so excited,” said Kelly Johnson, who helps Meals on Wheels spearhead the Valentine’s Day card initiative. “You can just see on their faces how much it means to them and that it makes their day.”

The cards were made before Thanksgiving because Johnson and her team of volunteers have to inspect each card by hand because there is a list of things that each one can, or can’t, say on it.

“Carolina and her students’ cards were awesome,” Johnson said. “While it usually takes us hours to go through a school's cards, I don’t think we spent more than an hour on the cards from Lake Catholic. They followed the parameters perfectly. Every person that hand-checked the cards from Lake Catholic loved them and came away very impressed.”

While a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Kane worked as a photographer and visual storyteller with John Carroll’s Center for Service and Social Action (now the Center for Service-Learning and Social Action), which is where she was then hired when she graduated from CIA. And she said service-learning is something she’s always been drawn to and wants to bring more of here at Lake Catholic.

“We see it all the time here – the spirit of giving and service,” she said. “It’s right there in the mission of Lake Catholic. I just want to continue to help our students appreciate their important role of service, but while also learning.”

According to the Council on Aging’s website, Meals on Wheels delivers food five days per week, with an option for frozen meals for the weekend. According to a study conducted by Brown University and funded by AARP Foundation, home delivered meals improve overall health, reduce anxiety and depression, decrease feelings of loneliness and isolation, and help seniors feel more safe and confident about living in their own home.