Upper School Holds Community Service Assembly

“The weather is hot / Pollution is not / So, stop it!”

So sang 10th-grader Jack Hohnen-Weber in an original song about global warming at the Sept. 30 Upper School Community Service Assembly. The ditty featured bleak facts about environmental degradation and offered remedies, including increased recycling and the undeniably creative proposal that Crossroads purchase every student a solar-powered Tesla.

Hali Morell and Ken Rosen of the Upper School Community Services Department spoke of Crossroads’ longstanding commitment to serving communities both locally and globally. Representatives of POPS the Club, which works with teens whose lives are impacted by the prison system, invited students to volunteer. And Nick Melvoin, who co-directs Camp Harmony along with Adam Slutske ’93, described the work performed by counselors (many of them current and past Crossroads students) supporting young campers who live below the poverty line.

Eleventh-grader Holly Konner has been a counselor at Camp Harmony since ninth grade. “As teenagers, sometimes it feels like we can barely take care of ourselves,” she reflected before the assembly began. “Camp Harmony taught me how to care for someone else. You just rise to the occasion. It’s an amazing experience.”

Seniors Kennedy Daniel and Talia Lichtstein, members of the Community Service Leadership Council, urged students to join their group every Friday at lunch, and to find service opportunities in line with their own passions and interests. Kennedy encouraged the crowd to “put yourself out there, not for the purpose of saving the world, but for the purpose of making an impact.”

Commitment to the greater community is one of the five principles upon which Crossroads was founded in 1971. The Upper School Community Service program is designed to instill in students a lifelong pattern of giving, by helping them to develop a connection with the larger society.