Ms. Jodi Esaili, AP Human Geography and World Geography teacher, does more than what people think. During ninth block, she takes a break from history and runs the community service class.
In total, 31 students participate in the community service class. Each student in the class must pick a place to go and be of service. Throughout the year, students chose to volunteer at the Mansfield Methodist Hospital, the Equestrian Center in Burleson, church stores and other schools within Mansfield ISD.
Baron Kane, a junior, stays at Legacy during his ninth period to help Ms. Sarah Ausdenmoore, the Student Council and Teen Leadership teacher.
“I love it,” Kane said. “It gives me more time to work on Student Council projects and it allows me to make Ms. Ausdenmoore’s stressful life a little less stressful.”
Ms. Ausdenmoore enjoys having the extra help during her ninth period class and acknowledges that it reduces the amount of stress she has.
“It made it easy,” Ms. Ausdenmoore said. “Typically I have things that need to be delivered and it was nice to have an extra hand at the end of the day when I didn’t have everything done that needed to get done.”
The community service class recently started a “Peer Coaching Program.” The first few days of the semester these peer coaches go through a training process where Ms. Esaili introduces rules and strategies to them to become better peer coaches. The peer coaches are then appointed students that need help understanding concepts in class. The peer coaches help them with these concepts, and also help motivate these students to complete their work on time. At the end of the year, peer coaches receive a college recommendation letter based on their performance and can earn up to 100 community service hours.
After seeing three other school districts include a mathematics tutoring program in their community service class, Ms. Esaili introduced the idea to Dr. Shelly Butler, the principal of Legacy. Since the idea was approved, mathematics peer coaches help students with their math classes.
“Math is an area of concern for many students, parents and school districts,” Esaili said. “I approached Dr. Butler about trying this to see if we could help freshmen adjust to high school math and improve understanding and comprehension.”
