Exeter community hopes to establish long-term relationship
Exeter, NH (June 9, 2006)—Launching the school’s second official “non sibi” community service trip, more than 65 Phillips Exeter Academy faculty, staff, students and family members plan to travel this month to Louisiana to volunteer their time and efforts to help a hurricane-ravaged community. From June 12–18, the PEA group intends to clean, repair and rebuild a charter school, homes and churches throughout the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans. Working with the local branch of the United Way, the Carrollton United Neighborhood Organization and the Greater St. John Missionary Baptist Church, the volunteers’ efforts will bring closer to fruition the community’s plan to open a charter school—in a building which had been abandoned since the 1980s—and help restore homes and churches destroyed by Hurricane Katrina last fall.
The idea for the New Orleans trip actually began half a world away, in August 2005, when PEA’s Alumni/ae Affairs Office sponsored its first “non sibi” trip to tsunami-wracked Southeast Asia. As part of the international response to the disaster, 40 Exeter community members joined a multi-national workforce in Khao Lak, Thailand, assisting on such projects as boat-building, tent-making, waste removal and house construction.
As the group returned home emotionally saturated by the experience, they committed to a service project in the United States. Within days, nature made the decision for them. Katrina devastated the Gulf region. Harold Brown, a 1974 Exeter graduate who is director of alumni/ae affairs and the trip’s coordinator, says PEA administrators brainstormed on involving the entire Exeter community in relief efforts to the region. They decided on a support project that included partnering with local residents.
Through the United Way, Brown was put in touch with Susan Burge, director of the School to Career Initiative, the group spearheading the effort to reopen the abandoned Alfred C. Priestley Middle School, located in the Carrollton neighborhood. The school will be known as the Priestley School of Architecture and Construction and the first 9th grade class will launch this fall at a temporary site. As the Priestley site is renovated as a charter high school and community center, housing adult training programs, health programs and after school care, the student body will grow one year at a time. The students will participate in the renovation of their own school and learning their crafts in the process, completing one floor at a time. Burge admits that it’s a large undertaking, but one with the potential to revitalize an entire neighborhood.
Brown explains, “The Carrollton project feels right because it allows Exeter to have an ongoing relationship with a community in the Gulf region, something that our project in Southeast Asia lacked.”
Many of the Exeter volunteers expressed a variety of motives for signing up. Some students said they hope to grow personally from the experience; a majority of staff, students and parents expressed a strong desire to help fellow Americans; while a number of parents said they hoped the trip helps their children better appreciate their own lives and grow from the opportunity to help others in need. Still other parents wanted to spend quality time with their families.
Ninth grader and day student Raymond Tilden said he’s looking forward to meeting the residents of Carrollton and expects the trip to be humbling and life changing. David Dunfee, a parent whose son will graduate from Exeter in 2007, said he hoped the trip would rekindle for those who lost so much a little faith in the American dream, eroded by the likes of Katrina and the war in Iraq. And Wendy Caceres, a 1999 alumna, said working specifically with schools was symbolic of a long-term contribution to revive a place where people gain education and skills to in turn, rebuild the region.
Exeter volunteers will have the opportunity to work alongside Carrollton residents who are intent on renewing their school, their homes and the neighborhood, not only for themselves, but to serve as a model of neighborhood revitalization nationwide, Burge says. “It all begins with a neighborhood saying this is what we want, not with outsiders coming in and saying this is what you need to do,” she says. “They (the residents) are working on faith towards a dream, and want to engage Exeter in that dream. We hope this is the beginning of a long relationship.”
Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, students come from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds. The diverse student body comes from approximately 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 25 foreign countries.
Contact: Julie Quinn Famebridge Witherspoon
(603) 777-3450 (603) 777-3267
jquinn@exeter.edu fwitherspoon@exeter.edu
