Volunteering At Elliot Elementary School

I am currently working at Kohls and I had the opportunity to volunteer to help out a local school. We went to the school to help till the ground in their courtyard to plant grass. The school recently tore down an old deck that was falling apart and needed extra hands to take out the rocks so they can plant the seeds. It took a lot of hard work to accomplish this in our short time of volunteering but we pulled through.

Realization
Although this was originally for my service learning project for one of my other classes, I was able to apply it to this one as well. After we finished tilling the ground, we were a bit concerned because there was so much clay in the ground. We were overall concerned that they may need topsoil to put down first before planting the seeds. We later found out that the school could not afford it. After my volunteering experience, I decided I would explore the demographics of the school and I was shocked at what I found. The school was primarily Hispanic and a lot of the students were "At Risk" and "Economically Disadvantaged".

Click the graphs to enlarge.

I also discovered that one of my co-worker's children attends that school as well. She complained that not a lot of parents helped fund the school's events or were involved in any way. She was really disappointed in the turnout of their kindergarten's holiday party because they were not able to do as much.

Gender Roles and Social Interactions
While we were digging I also got to witness some of her values on social roles and gender roles come out. She was working on digging out one of the large cement poles from the ground and made comments to this taller, more muscular African American about how he should be doing the hard work and not her. He responded that he just wanted to see if she could do it. Then she mentioned how the men in the family are the ones who do the hard labor and women are supposed to take care of the kids, not the other way around. They went back and forth for a while on this subject but it does prove the belief system that I researched earlier to be true.

For more information on the demographics, visit this website:
Texas Tribune- Elliott Elementary School