Columbia OLLIS students learn about local charities

It isn’t easy to decide what you’re going to support, but it’s important.”

Elaine Hassemer, principal, Our Lady of Lourdes Interparish School, Columbia

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This year’s celebration of Catholic Schools Week was much more than fun and games at Our Lady of Lourdes Interparish School (OLLIS) in Columbia.

The school’s 621 students took stock of the needs around them and made hard decisions about how best to help.

“It isn’t easy to decide what you’re going to support, but it’s important,” stated OLLIS Principal Elaine Hassemer.

“You have limited resources,” she said. “There are a lot of great charities out there, but you can’t support all of them. So, it’s important to do the research and take the time and reflect on the best use of what you have.”

Catholic Schools Week was celebrated throughout the United States on Jan. 29-Feb. 4. The theme was “Catholic Schools: Faith. Excellence. Service.”

OLLIS eighth-grade language arts teacher Donna Blauch worked with her students to identify four important nonprofit charities with local ties.

Students spoke about the charities at two school Masses during Catholic Schools Week and created a video highlighting the importance of each charity.

Students in kindergarten through eighth grade were encouraged to bring $1 to $3 apiece to donate. Doing so earned each participant a dress-down day on Feb. 1.

$3 was the limit.

“We asked parents to discuss it with their children at home,” said Mrs. Hassemer. “They had to decide — should they give all $3 to one charity, or spread it out.”

It made for some hard decisions, which the principal believes children need more practice making.

“We were telling them: We want you to really think about it and do the research and figure out which one to give to,” she said.

The teachers encouraged the students to pray before considering which charities to support.

“Depending on your situation and what you bring to the table from your own experience, there might be one or more that touches your heart more than the others,” Mrs. Hassemer noted.

“Be like Bernadette”

Mrs. Blauch said this activity got started last year while Catholic Charities Refugee Services was busy resettling hundreds of refugees from Afghanistan.

The idea came from a discussion several OLLIS teachers and administrators had about how to make Catholic Schools Week and giving more meaningful.

“We took that same focus and made it much bigger this year,” said Mrs. Blauch. “We wanted to think of things that our Catholic churches are involved in locally.”

The middle-schoolers settled on:

• Loaves & Fishes, which offers a free meal each evening for people who are hungry, hosted by Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church, with food donated, prepared and served by local congregations, including Columbia’s three Catholic parishes.
• Be The Change Volunteers (BTCV.us), through which individual volunteers raise money in order to spend 10 days helping local residents build education-related facilities in parts of the developing world. An OLLIS eighth-grader and his father recently took part in a BTCV project in Peru.
• St. Raymond’s Society, cofounded by an Our Lady of Lourdes parishioner, which provides housing, coaching, mentoring and other resources to help pregnant mothers in need become self-sufficient and provide a stable, loving home life to their children.
• The Our Lady of Lourdes Parish conference of the St. Vincent de Paul Society (SVDP), a world-wide Catholic lay charity. Last year, the conference responded to over 1,400 calls, helping over 1,200 adults and 1,000 children.

A group of seventh- and eighth-graders volunteered to work with Mrs. Blauch on the video promoting the four charities to the rest of the school.

It begins with a student standing by the statue of St. Bernadette Soubirous in the school. The student talks about how St. Bernadette was about the age of a middle-schooler when the Blessed Mother appeared to her and gave her an important message for the Church and the world.

Few people believed young Bernadette’s account, but she persisted in revealing it.

“This year, let St. Bernadette, a young girl, be our inspiration for charitable giving during Catholic schools week,” the student stated.

The student promoting Loaves & Fishes spoke while standing in the school cafeteria, where OLLIS students get plenty to eat and don’t have to worry about going hungry.

“Not just around the world, but here in our community of Columbia, people go hungry every day,” she noted.

The student promoting St. Raymond’s Society spoke from the hallway outside the kindergarten classroom, where “children are loved and cared for” and “life is sacred.”

“One day, these mothers can walk their children into kindergarten, just as my mother did nine years ago,” the student said.

Two students standing in the vestibule of Our Lady of Lourdes Church promoted the St. Vincent de Paul Society, using St. Vincent de Paul’s observation that “Charity is the cement which binds a community to God and persons to one another.”

A student spoke of Be The Change Volunteers from the school gym, noting that he’s lucky to have a nice place to learn and play the sport he loves.

By helping BTCV, “you can take a shot at building a better future for students all around the world,” he said while sinking a basket.

The students closed with a phrase from St. Bernadette: “Jesus came to earth to be my model.”

Here are the final totals:

• Loaves and Fishes — $430.35
• St. Raymond’s Society — $384.25
• Be The Change Volunteers — $197.50
• St. Vincent de Paul — $207.25

“I think this is one of the better things we do during Catholic Schools Week,” said Mrs. Hassemer. “We’re doing a work of mercy, but in the same regard, we’re learning about how you as a Catholic figure out what you’re going to support, and why.”

“That kind of leadership”

Mrs. Blauch was amazed at the compassion and enthusiasm the students brought to deciding which charities to help.

“A lot of the kids would come and say, ‘Which one hasn’t gotten any money yet?’” she stated. “They were very conscious of that.”

She said the students who promoted the charities learned important lessons about the power of persuasion.

“It was so positive,” she said, “and they felt so good when they did it. They felt like they accomplished something and talking to all the classes, that they were leading these charitable works for the whole school.

“That’s the purpose of Catholic education,” she said. “We’re promoting and hopefully building that kind of leadership for the next generation.”

Like every child, Mrs. Blauch’s middle-schoolers can act up or have a bad day.

“But there’s that empathy in them, and they like being of service to people,” she said. “They love that. And that’s something very, very special.”

Eight of Mrs. Blauch’s grandchildren attend OLLIS, and the ninth will when he gets old enough.

Mrs. Blauch plans to retire from the classroom at the end of this school year but temporarily continue coaching the school’s cheer squad.

“It’s been fun,” she said. “They have great teachers here. I have a great teacher taking my place. I know these kinds of great things will continue.”

As for her grandchildren, one of whom she has for class this year, Mrs. Blauch is confident that OLLIS is helping them always remember that God loves them unconditionally.

“No matter how hard things get in life, no matter what challenges they have, God is always the one thing they can trust,” she said. “He will always be there for them, always guiding their path. Even when something dark happens, he’s always guiding them to bring them to grace.”