Welcome to Passaic Valley Regional High School's
STAND UP SPEAK OUT Wiki page
Passaic Valley Regional High School is located in Little Falls, New Jersey and is approximately 12 miles from New York City. We are a regional high school servicing the towns of Little Falls, Totowa and Woodland Park. Our school population is 1,250+ students. Specifically, the class participating in STAND UP SPEAK OUT is called Contemporary Issues through Videoconferencing (CITVC). This course has a mission statement: "Through a vital global perspective, CITVC allows students to gain skills necessary for productive problem solving and decision-making. The refinement of these skills is aimed at preparing students to become effective and responsible contributors at the individual, community, state, national and international levels. Educational technology offers countless possibilities for learning, including videoconferencing, interactive virtual field trips, formal instruction, and dialogue with students, educators, and experts from around the country and the world. This class meets five days a week with a major focus on preparation and participation in videoconferences. It is a Media and Social Studies elective open to juniors and seniors with the drive to become citizens of the world."
Our class participated in this service project because our focus as a class is to make a difference. We have 10 months as a team together in the classroom and we want to expand our experience to include service projects. Gerda Weissmann Klein is an inspiration to all young people to become knowledgeable about the world and its history; speaking with her this school year provoked in us all the determination to make a difference. Our class feels that this service project fulfills our goals, which are: to encourage and foster student-to-student exchange and increase opportunities for both students and teachers to experience activities focused on global awareness, to use technology for direct access to sources of information that are continually changing in order to expand the walls of our school and library, to become effective and responsible contributors to problem-solving and to decision-making processes at individual, community, national, and international levels, to bring youth face-to-face to meet and to discuss world issues that affect and unite us all, and to encourage students to embrace their global citizenship by becoming knowledgeable and pro-active. 
Our project is to raise money for the Community Food Bank of New Jersey and to spend an afternoon volunteering to pack boxes at a local food. Gerda Weissmann Klein's message of no child should go hungry along with our goal of contributing within our own community spurred our class to fundraise for the local food bank. We held our fundraiser in the school's cafeteria for one week (the week of 2/7-2/11) and we collected monetary contributions. We asked students and faculty for change, even pennies! We succeeded in collecting $500 by week's end! We are so excited for this success and we cannot wait to share it with the administrators of the local food bank. Please visit http://www.njfoodbank.org for more info.
Updates:
2/23/11 - Our class has been in contact with a Volunteer Coordinator from CUMAC: Feeding People & Changing Lives located in Paterson, New Jersey - a city located very near our school. We are determined to give our money to a local food bank, meaning we want it to go to somewhere that we all know and within our county of Passaic. See: http://www.cumacecho.org/501.html
3/10/11 - We enjoyed our reflection session yesterday. Our partner school, Meigs High School, has a great three-year project planned with the middle school via a Big Sister/Brother program. All the schools in our session were so enthusiastic and we feel that we are most definitely carrying on the spirit of service in our communities that The Klein Foundation fosters.
Contact info:
Kathleen Menake
E-mail: pvkmenake@yahoo.com
Telephone: (973)890-2500 ext. 3049
Passaic Valley Regional High School
100 East Main Street
Little Falls, NJ 07424
Comments (2)
denise.arnold@meigslocal.org said
at 2:43 pm on Feb 28, 2011
Hello Passaic Valley Regional High School! This is Meigs High School. I am Mrs. Arnold the library media specialist at Meigs. Our project is being done by three of Mr. Abbott's 10th grade college prep history classes. Weather has been a huge factor for us since our initial video conference in November. We have missed a lot of school due to snow, but now flooding has been an issue!
Your project sounds interesting and what I find even more interesting is that it is all part of a videoconferencing course! What a great elective! We look forward to meeting you next week!
denise.arnold@meigslocal.org said
at 11:20 am on Mar 2, 2011
Hello Passaic Valley. We are getting a little anxious for our presentation on Wednesday. We are really still in the beginning stages of our project. We were wondering what your plan is for your presentation if you don't mind us asking.
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