Delivering “connection, commitment, intention and joy” is what NOVA Middle School enthusiastically offers local students. And all four outcomes are fully embodied by the school’s local youth service program that supports the surrounding community. “It’s good for them to see the interconnectedness,” says Beth Shera, seventh grade service teacher at NOVA. “They can see that the littlest things make a difference.”
“It helps them realize they can have an impact,” adds Heather Guz, also a NOVA seventh grade service teacher. “It’s an empathy-building activity. They can find they are passionate about a variety of projects throughout the year, and that they can help others in lots of different ways.”
“Sometimes it can be huge things, and sometimes it can be small things,” adds Guz. “That’s what service is.”
NOVA Recognizes the Importance of Youth Programs Providing Services to the Local Community
NOVA’s curriculum for sixth through eighth graders recognizes that highly capable learners crave depth, complexity, authenticity, and an exciting learning pace. The private middle school offers comprehensive support to help students manage their social, creative and academic lives. As part of its holistic approach, NOVA embraces the importance of students’ involvement in their local community, requiring seventh graders to participate in community service. The goal is for all seventh graders to contribute eight hours of community service outside the classroom during the school year.
While Shera and Guz organize several activities and events to help seventh graders fulfill their community service requirements, students are also invited to suggest projects. “There is flexibility,” says Guz in how students complete their service requirements.
If students want to propose their own community service project idea, they conduct the research, pitch the idea to the class, and the class votes on it. One recent project coming out of that student-driven process had students write thank you notes to “foster parents” in the Old Dog Haven program, a nonprofit that organizes volunteers to care for senior unadoptable, abandoned or soon to be homeless dogs who are in their golden years and often ill.
NOVA Students Positively Impact Their Community Through the Independent Middle School’s Youth Programs
NOVA’s seventh graders give their time and talents to multiple area organizations, while learning the importance of building and sustaining the external and internal ties that bind where they live and learn.
The Thurston County Food Bank is just one example of an organization benefiting from NOVA’s service program. Shera says students have collected and dropped off food, as well as volunteered their time working at the bank. “If they collect food for community members, it raises them up and supports the whole community,” says Shera. “They see that it bolsters the community and benefits them, too.” Guz describes that food bank activities, such as preparing food bags for kids at local area schools to take home, raises students’ awareness of food challenges in their local community, in turn building empathy.
Another example is ORCA Recovery Day. This statewide event features habitat restoration activities and raising orca habitat awareness. Locally, NOVA students planted trees and pulled ivy to improve the quality of the environment for waters flowing into the orcas’ Puget Sound home. “Students learned about the impact of their work on the whole ecosystem,” says Guz. “It’s all connected,” adds Shera. “Their efforts on land improved the habitat for bugs and salmon, which in turn benefited the orcas” In a similar project students pulled invasive weeds at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, helping to restore the habitat for native species.
Other student activities supporting the community include making bookmarks for the South Sound Reading Foundation, writing encouraging notes to a cancer patient, and making pen pals in other schools. Writing welcome notes to incoming NOVA sixth graders illustrates a service that builds the internal school community as well. “This is the second year they have done this,” says Guz. “When last year’s seventh graders wrote notes to the incoming sixth graders, the students remembered that a year later. Now, those students, are seventh graders and they wanted to have the same impact on the new sixth graders.”
NOVA’s Real-World Focus Delivers Education Options That Foster Empathy, Responsibility and Active Citizenship
NOVA Middle School’s service programs are part of the multiple education options providing real-world learning opportunities to foster empathy, teach responsibility and develop active citizenship. With the food drive, students established committees, created a giant “thermometer” to measure progress, and planned a field day for the entire student body after they met their goal. Through service activities like these, NOVA students learn what it means to be organized, carry a mission forward, and be good citizens.
For more information on this local school voted Best of South Sound 2023 and 2024, visit the NOVA Middle School website or give the school a call.
NOVA Middle School
2020 22nd Ave SE, Olympia
360.491.7097
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