Service Providers, cont.

Members of the football team tutor at Donegan School on Bethlehem’s South Side, wearing their football jerseys so the heroic aura of sports isn’t lost on the kids. Music education students bring an international array of percussion instruments for an impromptu jam session by teenagers in the Communities in Schools program in Allentown. And women of Sigma Sigma Sigma sorority meet on Monday afternoons in the Doghouse (a basement hangout that doubles as a campus cabaret) with junior high and high school kids from Lehigh County’s Juvenile Detention Center.

Some of these activities are class assignments or practice sessions for student teaching; some are organized to get community-service points for a campus club, team, or service organization. But many of the tutors sign up in the first place, or continue after the project is finished, because the kids need some personal time with someone who cares about them.

“It’s a good structured time for them. Some of them don’t have the home life to go to, parents who will say ‘Do your homework,’ ” said Danielle Dest ’03, one of 10 Sigma sisters who tutors juvenile offenders on probation in a program organized by Lucy McCammon, assistant professor of sociology. The program is called TEAM (Teen Enrichment through Advocacy at Moravian) and is a cooperative activity with a non-profit agency called the Impact Project, whose juvenile activities are coordinated by Todd Breinich.

“They get a lot of peer pressure, their parents are in rough marriages, they’ve got older siblings continually in trouble,” Dest explains. “But I think I’ve had a good impact on them. It’s nice because they feel like they can talk to you.”

Dest, who is majoring in psychology and sociology, has a longtime commitment to working with children. She tutored in high school and, in her freshman year, through a program with the Moravian women’s softball team, worked with the America Reads program at William Penn School near campus. She’d like to work in a children’s hospital after she graduates.

“He’s the best kid in the world,” she said of the boy she works with. “You’d never guess that he’d get into trouble. But kids will be kids, and they’re going to try things. This is a good age to get ’em. The statistics show that the majority of these kids will not get into trouble again.”

Birds do it, bees do, even members of football teams do it.

Head football coach Scot Dapp initiated a community service project at Donegan School after one of his players had a field experience there. He arranged to take a dozen players—only a few in education, the rest majoring in everything from psychology to criminal justice—for a block of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Many of the kids at Donegan were part of a “new student class” (transferring from other elementary schools); others simply needed some individual attention. “This is on the South Side of Bethlehem. You’ve got Hispanic kids, white kids, African-American kids,” he said. “Within five minutes of being there, the teachers had put all my players to work, some as teaching assistants in the classroom, others as tutors for math problems, spelling, you name it.” Stephen Maslanek ’04, went to a music class. Dapp said: “I asked him ‘What did you do in a music class?’ He said: ‘Hey, coach, I was singing with everybody.’ ”

In addition to giving his players the chance to help someone, Dapp said, it gives them a feeling of importance that they may never get on a team, where they’re taking orders from senior players and coaches. That’s one reason he told them to wear their jerseys. From the minute they entered the room, the kids knew that guys on a sports team were willing to come work with them on math and spelling. Dapp said: “It gives them a little chance to be in an authoritative position, where someone’s looking up to them.”

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Jason Kwiatkowski ’04 tutors a student at Donegan Elementary School.