Students may be surprised to see recently retired principal Paul Robinson greeting students and staff during the school day this fall, but P-Rob’s sporadic cameos on campus are part of his new position as service learning coordinator.
Robinson stepped in as coordinator this fall after the school’s former coordinator, Tim Galleher, started working full-time for Valley Christian High School at the end of the 2018-19 school year.
Robinson, who said he did not want to see the program disappear, volunteered to take it over with “all of this free time” in his retirement.
The service learning program, which began with a district grant in 2013, facilitates student and staff involvement in volunteer projects. During the holidays, the program arranges the annual Family Giving Tree drive, where students purchase gifts described by gift tags for children in need and place the presents under the tree in the office. The program also works with teachers, initiating service learning into the curriculum. For example, the AP Environmental Science class works with Galleher to create student-run service projects; last year, 120 students from the class volunteered a total of 500 hours.
As the service learning coordinator, Robinson will serve as the liaison between organizations and the school, corresponding with each group to schedule events and recruit volunteers.
Although service learning projects happen less often early in the school year, Robinson said they tend to build up in the spring semester.
Some organizations, Robinson said, require a lot of back and forth correspondences, causing slight delays in committing to a date and organizing supplies for the project. Non-profit groups must sometimes pay special care to organizing dates for when their supplies — such as raw food materials, bags and bins — will be available. Others must coordinate based on seasonal need. During the holidays, groups often receive more volunteers than they need, whereas during other parts of the year, they lack adequate help.
With organizations that the school has traditionally worked with, the communication is more streamlined and efficient.
“When all of our students and teachers get involved in the program, organizations know that these are really great folks coming down, that they’re going to work hard and that they’re going to be kind,” Robinson said.
Robinson said the program has grown from less than 150 volunteers in 2013 to nearly 600 to 700 student participants today.
“We’re very, very blessed in this area, and there are a lot of privileges that we have that a lot of folks don’t have,” Robinson said. “For our students, our staff and me, being able to work in different environments where people are not so privileged and gaining empathy for the situations that they’re in creates stronger ties to our world.”
Service, he said, also unites communities for their common goal. He remembered a project in San Diego that he was part of before coming to Saratoga, in which 1,600 students and over 400 family groups packaged over 1 million meals over the course of a three-day weekend, working together in groups of six. Student groups like sports teams and clubs banded together with people in the community, and their collective work impacted communities in Tanzania and the Philippines and Haitian families affected by Hurricane Gustav in 2008.
“We did it out in a parking lot and had all the materials out there and people just came and worked hard,” Robinson said. “Lots of loud music, lots of complaints from our neighbors, but that’s okay. We were doing a good thing.”
He also said volunteers can use this understanding to offer their help in closing the gap current reality and what they want the world to be.
Beyond getting a good handle on his new position, Robinson hopes to bring school-community volunteers together from the campuses in the area. Robinson said service learning coordinators are rare, even more so in public schools like Saratoga High, but he and Galleher have already found and contacted service learning coordinators from a few other schools like Pioneer High School in San Jose.
“We want to bring everybody together, start sharing some of the good things that are going on in our campuses and hopefully share even more connections with the different organizations that are out there,” Robinson said.
Along with the ongoing projects, Robinson hopes to start “wrapping our arms” around Team Red, White and Blue, an organization that helps families adjust to coming home after war by organizing therapy and providing drivers to Veterans Affairs hospitals. He is not sure if Saratoga can recruit the workforce necessary to package 1 million meals the way the San Diego community did in conjunction with Friends and Family Community Connection, but he hopes to build a relationship with similar food packaging organizations like Stop Hunger Now.
“All of these packages are easily shipped out to wherever you want in the country and the world — they feed the world that way,” Robinson said.
Robinson is glad to continue the school’s service learning program for as long as possible.
“It’s a little weird,” he said about coming back to the campus. “It’s interesting to not have all the responsibilities that I had before and to be able to enjoy sitting down and talking with students. I think my blood pressure has dropped like 80 points, but I love being here.”