Lewiston-Porter Middle School students beautify River Region

Last week Thursday, about 300 Lewiston-Porter Middle School students participated in cleanup activities in Lewiston and Youngstown. They partnered with the Lewiston Beautification Committee, the Youngstown Garden Club and Old Fort Niagara.

The service-learning day consisted of classroom instruction and a field trip.

Claire Marshall, an eighth grade consultant teacher at Lewiston-Porter Middle School and a member of the crew team, said “a portion of the day we were in the building and were doing learning activities around community service and giving back to your community, and then we have this portion of the day where we're actually out and taking kids to multiple different locations to let them have an experience.”

In Lewiston, a group of students and teachers worked with Lewiston Beautification and were assisted by the Department of Public Works in painting lampposts on Center Street and at Lewiston Landing; painting the fire hydrants on Center Street; mulching and painting at the International Peace Garden; and planting flowers in the wrap-around lampposts at Lewiston Landing.

“Lewiston Beautification was thrilled to receive community help from the eighth grade class at Lew-Port!” member Tasia Fitzpatrick said. “They all were enthusiastic, polite, energetic and sure made us proud that they not only live in our community, but also support it!”

Stefanie Bond, a seventh and eighth grade Spanish teacher at Lewiston-Porter Middle School, and a crew member, said the goal was “to truly experience the service learning that we find is so valuable for our students to have.

“It's part of our crew program that we run at the middle school where we focus on social/emotional learning. This is like our culminating day, where we have a little bit of fun, we do a little bit of service, and it kind of buttons up the end of the year for us.”

Other crew members include Leah Herman, Laura Kimoto, Kevin Kirsch and Annette Rayome – who oversaw the schedule on Thursday.

“Crew is an idea that we're all on board this ship called life, and we're all working together to move ourselves forward in whatever ways you want to imagine – socially, emotionally, with the relationships that we're building, the educating of our students, all that stuff,” Bond said.

Marshall said, “In the beginning part of the day, we had some Lions Club members, Kiwanis members, the high school leadership class came over also, and a couple UB football players came and spoke with the kids about the importance of community service and what the value is in giving back to your community. They were able to get some feedback from people who do it consistently.”

She added, “This is a really unique opportunity that we are able to focus in on social/emotional learning and character development in school with the students – and not all schools have that. The fact that we have a 20-minute block every day where we can pause on academics and focus on how the kids are doing, how they're feeling, what their needs are, and just have a relationship with the kids – that's really the goal of the crew program, is for teachers to be able to develop relationships with the kids that are not solely focused on grades and academics.”

Bond said, “A team of teachers came together post-COVID (2021). We realized our students need something. We need to be able to connect with them in a different way, and we already had the advisory period, which was a 20-minute period built into our school day, and we wanted to leverage that time in a better way to be able to build a community of people in our classroom to connect to each other – the teachers to the students, the students to the students. We leveraged the idea of restorative practices to build in community circles, so students are practicing just normal conversation and engagement with others, and active listening.

“It's just kind of blossomed. Big thing for us was focusing on not only the experiences in the classroom, but also being able to provide them with experience outside of the classroom, whether that be service-learning fieldtrips; we do community gatherings where we would have guest speakers come in – we've had some incredible speakers over the years; we've done in-house service projects where we've made pet toys and donated them to the animal shelter.

“Or coloring books for the mental health facilities, and Children's Hospital,” Marshall noted.

“It really blossomed into something beautiful over the last few years, and it's something that we're really proud to be a part of at the middle school,” Bond said.

Lewiston Beautification Committee member Tasia Fitzpatrick gives Lewiston-Porter Middle School students directions outside of the Red Brick Municipal Building before groups headed out to beautify the village.

Lewiston-Porter crew members Claire Marshall and Stefanie Bond.

University at Buffalo football players Jon Capo and Matt Hilty.