Georgetown Day School

Community service and service-learning are integral components of every GDS student's education. Through involvement in the program, students are encouraged to become active community members working to improve the lives of others. By participating in service projects throughout their school careers, students enhance their capacities for compassion and empathy, establish a lifelong commitment to personal altruism, and form a civic awareness that leads them to search for social justice and to work for social change.

Service-learning provides a link between the classroom and the outside world that brings greater relevance and meaning to both. In addition to reinforcing academic skills, participation in the program enables students to become socially adept in ways that will prove vitally important throughout their school careers and beyond. The real-life situations that students encounter help them learn decision-making skills, gain self-reliance and develop the ability to act responsibly. GDS students gain an invaluable education in navigating an increasingly multicultural, interdependent world.

The PK–12 Georgetown Day School Service-Learning Program provide a continuum designed to move students from an understanding of the meaning of service and altruism to and increasingly sophisticated understanding of significant social and environmental issues. In building this foundation of service, students come into contact with a variety of communities and cultures that may differ from their own and gain a better sense of where they themselves fit in the larger community.

Service-learning exemplifies experiential education. Students connect what they learn in the classes to their work in the community and then bring that knowledge back into the classroom. Once provided with these tools, students leave GDS equipped to work for equity and social justice.

Service is fundamental to the school’s mission; the PK–12 program embodies the principals and values on which the school was founded.

• Respect for the integrity, worth, and diversity of others

• The embrace of intellectual, creative, and physical challenges

• Strength of character

• Concern for others

• Self-reliance, curiosity, and imagination

• Social justice

• Citizens of the world