By Sophie Weinstein ’13, Contributor

After the overwhelming response from students to participate in service opportunities last year, Deborah Floyd, Dean of Service Learning, created a yearlong theme of serving children, especially ill children, to help focus the community’s service efforts.

“Each month the upper school will host some type of activity that will benefit sick children and/or their families,” Ms. Floyd said. She said she felt that the large number of ideas all could be incorporated into the one theme of helping children. She also said she hopes that participation and profits in one centered area will help to make a larger difference.   “I was getting approached by a lot of students all with great ideas for service projects and there seemed to be a common link between them; children,” Ms. Floyd said.

To kick off the yearlong service effort towards children, CCDS is hosting a walk Sat., Oct. 23 to benefit Children’s Hospital.  Senior Greg Dick brought the event to campus. A school event conflicted with the date of the walk at Children’s, so Dick moved the walk to CCDS in hopes of garnering more participation from students.  Two years ago he participated in the Cincinnati Children’s Walk, but unfortunately signed up too late to create a CCDS team. This year Dick decided to get the school involved.

“After walking and seeing how much good this one event does for the hospital, the children and the thousands of people who supported it, I thought CCDS should have a walk team too,” said Greg. Greg said he is optimistic about change of the event date. “[The date change] might allow more people to participate for the first time.” He is hopeful that CCDS will continue participating in the walk. “I just hope that someone gets a CCDS walk team together for next year and makes this a tradition,” Greg said.

The large “CCDS loves kids” banner in the dining terrace can be hard to miss with the large heart and bunches of Band-Aids stuck to it. Its purpose is to publicly thank all that take part in the community service efforts for children.

“At each monthly event, students who participate or donate funds will be able to put their names on a Band-Aid and have it added to the community heart,” Ms. Floyd said. “At the end of the year we hope to present this banner to Children’s Hospital, a main beneficiary of our efforts.” Ms. Floyd wants to assure students that the central effort of helping children “doesn’t mean we can’t do other service projects that aren’t for children or geared toward helping children, but once a month we will do a project to benefit children.”

For October, there is not only the Walk-A-Thon for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, but also Reverse Trick-or-Treating, which will help to raise awareness about child slaves forced to make chocolate. In November, CCDS will be working with former teacher Mrs. Bobby Menter for a project called Josh Cares, which raises money to support children at Children’s Hospital whose parents live out of state.

Also, Juniors Alyssa Bardach, Haleigh Miller, and Emily Ashwell will host a tea party on Nov. 21 to raise funds to build a school in Afghanistan. December will still host the annual wrap-in, which benefits many agencies that serve needy children during holidays.

So far Ms. Floyd feels good about the direction community service is taking at CCDS this year. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive and has resulted in more students coming up with various ideas on how to help sick children,” Ms. Floyd said. “Selecting an annual theme has helped to focus our work.”

Photo by Ilana Habib ’11, Photography Editor