Janella Brand - Holy Innocents' Episcopal School

SERVICE AND MISSION WORK
As an Episcopal school, with
weekly chapel services and
four chaplains, Holy Innocents’
can’t help but approach its
philosophy and methods with
a nod toward the Bible. So why
does Luke 12:48 receive so
much attention
“From him to whom much is
given, much is expected,” reads
the verse.
And students at Holy
Innocents’ have, indeed, been
given much. They attend a
beautiful school in a beautiful
section of a beautiful city. And
they learn very early that much
is, therefore, expected.
What’s so refreshing, though,
is how quickly and joyfully Holy
Innocents’ students take Saint
Luke’s words to heart.
It begins in the Alan A. Lewis
Pre-School, where this year our
youngest students chipped in
their own allowances to help
secure school supplies for
children their own age attending
the Albert T. Mills Enrichment
Center, an organization in
downtown Atlanta serving at-risk children.
The Holy Innocents’ Parents Association
was so impressed by the work our Pre-
Schoolers did that they dedicated the
proceeds of this year’s Fun Run to purchase
a bus for the center.
In Lower School, service is built into the
curriculum. Students study virtues such as
charity and the Golden Rule in LS Chaplain
Ms. Beth Lynch’s class, where she makes
a concerted effort to link her lessons with
community outreach.
For instance, to learn patience and
the art of conversation, Ms. Lynch’s
students interact with elderly residents
of the Dorothy Benson Adult Day Care
Center, staging a tea party or giving hand
massages, all while engaging the seniors
in heartfelt conversation. For a lesson on
homelessness, Lower Schoolers visited the
Atlanta Children’s Shelter where they put on
Emily Martin
Kendall Gregory
puppet shows, hosted picnics and simply
played with a group of young children for
whom playtimes are few and far-between.
“We do all of this, studying, doing the
lessons and getting out into the community,
to learn how to be God’s hands and feet,
because this is what we’re called to do,”
says Ms. Lynch.
That calling doesn’t subside, but rather
gains momentum in Middle School, where
chaplain The Reverend Patty Roberts
leads the service efforts. Her students
work throughout the city on projects from
assisting the disabled to food drives to
working with the homeless to preserving the
environment. “At chapel last year, I read the
list of everything we had done for service,
and it was overwhelming,” beamed Rev.
Roberts. “It was over three and a half pages
of different service opportunities students
had taken advantage of.”
And it’s in Middle School where Rev.
Rawson Allen
Roberts helps students begin
to focus their efforts. Her
Great Days of Service program
allows students to divide one
day of service between two
organizations. The idea is to
let them experience different
types of outreach and decide
what kinds of projects and
causes most interest them.
“Then hopefully, when the kids
are in Upper School they’ll be
able to draw from the work
they did here, and already
have an idea of what sort of
volunteer work they want to
pursue,” Rev. Roberts says.
And that leads us to Upper
School, where the verse from
Luke really takes hold.
Holy Innocents’ Upper
School has gained a significant
reputation – not only in Atlanta
but throughout the South
and even overseas – for the
commitment and energy of its
students to community service.
Many Upper Schoolers
help with Horizons, a summer
enrichment program located
on the HIES campus. Horizons works
with at-risk and disadvantaged children
to prevent academic decline during the
summer months through a variety of
educational, social and athletic activities.
Upper School volunteers help translate for
the large Latino population who attends
Horizons. They also serve as Teachers’
Aides, help with swim lessons and tutor
young children with their academics. Not
surprisingly, HIES students accounted for a
full 95 percent of Horizons’ 1,200 volunteer
hours last year.
Of course, with age comes privilege, so
Upper Schoolers also have opportunities to
travel to perform service beyond their local
community.
For three years running, groups of Upper
Schoolers have traveled to the Gulf Coast to
assist with the cleanup efforts in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina. This spring, students
Casey Wilson, Amanda Bassett Nick Bitzis, Bailey McBride, Evy Mitchell Kendall Krebs
Corinne Bicknese,
Olivia Stockert,
My Bui
cleaned storm drains and picked up debris
along the Mississippi coast. “I was just so
impressed with the effort that they put into
this job,” said The Reverend Sarah Wood,
US Chaplain and leader of the effort. “It was
thankless work, but they didn’t stop.”
Another of the Upper School’s cleanup
efforts is closer to home. What started
as an AP Environmental Science project
monitoring the water quality in Sandy
Springs’ Allen Park has transformed into
a full-blown park clean up. After analyzing
bacteria in the creek water, students
detected a problem. But instead of telling
authorities and getting back to their
schoolwork, the students opted to address
the issue themselves, and hopefully improve
the entire park. They picked up years’ worth
of accumulated trash, planted indigenous
trees and other plant species and wrote
letters to Sandy Spring Council members.
Today, thanks to the students’ hard work,
local non-profits have joined the effort and
are working toward the park’s restoration.
And then there are those service projects
that take place within our school’s walls.
Recycling is an HIES cross-grade initiative
in which virtually everyone participates.
Students also lead many fundraising efforts
– donating money to the Atlanta Children’s
Shelter, the American Diabetes Association,
and schools in Haiti, Costa Rica and
Tanzania, among other causes.
In other words, Holy Innocents’ students
tend to what they see needs tending. “As an
Episcopal school, we are committed to the
formation of the whole person, which is not
focused on oneself,” said Rev. Wood. “We
do everything we can to help students learn
that offering and outpouring of self to others
is what makes them whole.”
So in a day and age of hand sanitizers
and anti-bacterial lotions as far as the eye
can see, it’s comforting to know that HIES
students are comfortable getting their hands
dirty. In a twist on the adage, “a little dirt
never hurt anybody,” our students have
learned that a little dirt can actually help out
quite a bit.
Luke 12:48 never rang so true.
Connor Randall
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