Community Service

Elementary School

The School to School Programme is one part of the Elementary School’s Community Service Programmes. The School to School (STS) committee was established as an immediate reaction to the tsunami which hit Aceh in 2004.

At the beginning, the programme focused on teacher quality improvement and worked in partnership with IB Aceh interactive teaching projects.  Starting in 2007, the STS programmes shifted their focus to helping schools around Lakarsantri and Surabaya.

In this current school year, apart from teacher training, the school donated good quality used chairs to schools around Lakarsantri and Menganti, as well as to a school in an ex-leper community in Tambak Bening. So far 350 used chairs have been donated.

Four School to School representatives organized the distribution to the targeted schools.  They also had discussions with the school principals to identify future actions that would support the schools in providing better education for their students. As a result of the discussion, a teacher workshop will be run focusing on teaching core subjects such as Mathematics and Bahasa Indonesia.

High School

Community Service in the Junior High school consists of a variety of activities in which all students engage at various times throughout the year. These will change from year to year depending on needs that students see but a sample of recent activities includes developing a library for use by local schools and communities, supporting a local orphanage, planting trees, teaching English at local schools and raising money for earthquake victims.

In the Senior High school, Community Service is part of the CAS requirement which all students undertake, regardless of which programme they are in. Students identify issues either locally or globally and design strategies that they can use to address those issues. Activities over recent years have included making postcards to raise funds for AIDS victims, developing and operating a mobile community library to lend books to street children, learning and using skills to help build houses for homeless or displaced people, cooking and serving food at a local soup kitchen and donating blood.