The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Learn and Serve Missouri and the Missouri Service-Learning Advisory Council sponsor this event and the awards.  To be eligible for this award, a student or a group of students must be members of a Learn and Serve America program or a School-based Service-Learning program.  They must also show excellent leadership skills, understand the principles of Service-Learning, and perform exemplary service to the community.  There is no age requirement nor a length of experience requirement.  Any age can be an inspiration to others and this is our chance to look up to some shining stars in our state.  Each student had to be nominated by teacher or coordinator at their school.  Every school has outstanding examples of service to others, but based on the nominees, not only did they perform outstanding service, but they allowed others to shine as well.  They also showed others the importance of service to their community, whether that community is a classroom, a school or their city or town.  Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.”

Marquaisha Loggins has been an active and enthusiastic participant in service-learning for three years.  During these years, she has participated in numerous projects and given many hours of personal time to the development and implementation of service-lerning activities.  Her service-learning work includes projects with:  Peace Jam, John Know Hospice, Ronald McDonald House, Harvesters, St. Vincent’s Day Care, Don Bosco Center and Community Assistance Council.  In her work she has been a leader in every sense of the word.  Marquaisha deserves recognition for her outstanding service because she has demonstrated that service is not just a random event in a person’s life, but rather a lifestyle.    She has been an excellent model of how a student should use his/her classroom learning to solve community problems, and then use the experience to grow personally through self-reflection.  Marquaisha Loggins is a junior in the CODE Program of Hickman Mills school district.

Tristen Hilpert and the Scotland Co. 6th Grade Elementary Students have been leaders in service-learning in their school.   Tristan and his class raised money to help a family who lost their house to a fire.  The students set up a table in the front doors of the school as well as a booth at a local bazaar and collected money, clothes, books and games.  The students collected money for a week and raised $2,500 and the three children in the family of the fire were fully clothed including coats, hats, boots and gloves after the second day.  They presented the money to the family during the Christmas Music Concert and there wasn’t a dry eye in the auditorium and the students were very proud of their accomplishments.  The sixth graders have also held a K-6 Mac and Cheese Drive which collected over 300 boxes of Macaroni and Cheese for the local food pantry and in December they held a coat drive that donated more than 100 coats to their local Clothes Closet.

The Textiles I class at Jefferson City Academic Center has started a service-learning project that became one of compassion.  The students saw a need to make the stay for children in a local pediatric unit of the hospital a little more enjoyable.  This came about from personal experience of several students within the class.  The students decided to make pillowcases for the patients to have as keepsakes.  The students completed 75 pillowcases and presented them to Capital Region Medical Center Pediatric Unit.  Upon the presentation and a newspaper article, the students were contacted to assist with the same project but with the Children’s Hospital at the University of Missouri.    The students have made the project their own and realize they can make a difference, no matter how small.

Cara Gooch, Claudia Baer, Bridgette Ayala, Ally Francka and Sommer Edwards, all students and FCCLA members from Bolivar High School truly depict Service Above Self and have inspired by example.  The students determined a need for 5th grade students to learn about a local veteran hero, John Playter, and teach the students about his sacrifices in WWII as a POW and his service to the community during his membership in the local Rotary Club for approximately 50 years.  The students met with the 5th grade teachers to plan and teach lessons from the Mr. Playter’s book, Survivor and assisted the students with tree plantings in the park honoring him.  Upon completion of the projects, the 5th graders wrote essays and drew illustrations for a book in honor of Mr. Playter and the theme from the Rotary Club, Service Above Self.  Mr. Playter passed away in March and one of the essays were read at his funeral service.   It stated a belief that heroism is real, and it can be achieved every day and finally, the essay cited a new realization that serving others and our community is a real and meaningful purpose.

Tony Powell and Nathan Rutherford exemplify a core value in our service-learning program.  Both young men have a solid understanding of the principles of service-learning and have demonstrated those principles time and time again in various projects.  One project in participle, Pennies for Patients, has gone on to be a huge success.  It started out as an action research paper that they were completing in which they learned how many individuals were affected by leukemia.  They started leading their fellow peers, then on to elementary students and then eventually into the community.  Tony and Nathan found ways to address and implement techniques that would help leukemia patients.  They created lesson plans for elementary students that taught younger students the impact of one penny.  Tony and Nathan and their classmates were door to door educating the public, set out coffee cans at local businesses and handed out flyers to business patrons.  Because of their hard work Fulton Academy is continuing their commitment to the Pennies for Patients program.

Megan Kraus uses her learning experiences everyday to improve the lives of others.  Megan took initiative in several service-learning projects within her school and community.  Megan has gone above and beyond in the Books of Hope project that matches schools with vulnerable children in Uganda who need books to further their reading education program.  In the classroom Megan was quick to start the editing process of her books.  She took the initiative to go above and beyond and actually helped with 3 books while the requirement was only one per student.  She was also an instrumental leader in giving ideas and suggestions to others.  Over the past year she became an advocate of the program throughout the school by serving as a mentor and speaker for the program.  During the Books of Hope project she simultaneously worked on another service-learning activity in which her language arts class adopted a soldier to write to.  She also organized a drive to send the soldier goodies from home.  There was also a Christmas drive for toys and once the soldier returned he passed out these toys to needy children in the community as well as to children in Kosovo.  Megan has now taken this adopted soldier project into her church.  Megan is a Senior at Seckmann Senior High.

The Ridgewood Middle School National Junior Honor Society have greatly impacted their community with the Annual Veteran’s Day Celebration for the past 3 years.  This year the students filled a community need by providing much needed items to the troops by partnering with the Local UAW.  Every year Chrysler’s UAW sends coolers filled with items to our troops in Iraq; however, with the lay-offs this year, they were struggling to fill their coolers with donations.  The day of the celebration begins with providing breakfast to the local veterans and their family members and then escorted through the “Walk of Honor” in the halls of Ridgewood.  Students and staff line the halls with American flags while patriotic music fills the corridors.  The veterans are then escorted to the gym to an assembly honoring them.  Following the assembly all veterans are invited to stay for the rest of the day.  During this time, activities and lessons that relate to veterans are planned by the NJHS students for all classes.  The FACS classes learn about Meals Ready to Eat, language arts classes wrote acrostic poems about a “veteran”, math classes graphed statistics related to past wars, and reading classes responded to the prompt “why is it important to continue honoring our veterans?”  The students involved in NJHS are directly responsible for planning and implementing all aspects of the celebration.  The students work in committees, promote the event, plan the breakfast menu, plan the assembly and plan the curriculum connections for all academic areas.  The celebration greatly impacts all involved and the veterans are very appreciative to be honored.