Stevenson wins national community service prize
In recognition of the thousands of hours students committed to volunteer projects in the past year, Stevenson High School has received a national award for public service, officials announced Wednesday.
The Lincolnshire school joins Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other celebrities and community leaders as recipients of 2011 Jefferson Awards, a recognition dubbed the Nobel Prize for public service.
“We’re deeply humbled,” said Brett Erdmann, Stevenson’s community service coordinator. “It’s very, very rewarding to be recognized on a national level.”
Stevenson was honored with the Students in Action prize. It was the only school in the country to receive the honor this year.
The prize recognized the roughly 55,000 hours of volunteer work Stevenson High students put in on school-sanctioned projects. Students worked on a freshman mentor program, the March Madness fundraiser for disaster relief in Japan, the annual Give-a-Thon effort that collects holiday gifts for needy families, food-pantry collections and countless other programs.
“Stevenson has a reputation as a great academic school, but this award shows that our students also have a lot of heart,” school spokesman Jim Conrey said in an email. “They’ve done a lot of great things for people in all walks of life.”
The award also celebrated the more than $250,000 students raised for local charities.
But those totals are only a fraction of the volunteer work the kids performed over the last year, Erdmann said. They don’t include efforts undertaken with local synagogues, churches or other groups, he said.
All of the school-sanctioned projects were grass-roots efforts conceived and developed by students, Erdmann said. None were instituted by teachers or administrators, he said.
The awards were presented Tuesday in Washington D.C. and Wednesday in New York City. A team from Stevenson High received the school’s accolades during the Tuesday ceremony.
Representing the school were recent graduates Brady Richter, Cole Deloye, Lainie Fox, Danielle Marks, Kayla Reinherz and Greg Schultheis, as well as seniors Neha Rao and Anderlyn Russell.
Erdmann and Student Activities Director Ted Goergen accompanied the teens to Washington.
Richter stressed the teens who traveled to Washington were there to represent the entire student body.
“There are so many kids (who) played such an integral part in winning this award,” he said.
Richter called the prize and the trip to Washington a great way to end his high school career.
The Jefferson Awards program was created in 1972 to honor public service. Co-founders included former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and U.S. Sen. Robert Taft Jr.