SITES and Butternut Ridge Cemetery

At the Landmarks tour I asked Jeff Zullo send me information on the S.I.T.E.S program. at the end of his answer I will tell you how it relates:

Here is that synopsis of the SITES Program that we talked about yesterday:

SITES stands for Social Involvement Through Education and Service, and it is a senior level elective program that offers an alternative to the traditional school day.  SITES includes senior level English, History, and an elective credit of service-learning.  SITES offers a differentiated approach to learning, offering an environment of mixed learning between Honors and Generals.

SITES is blocked three periods a day.  Three days a week, students attend class to engage in a multi-disciplinary approach to learning.  Two days a week, students are released from class, and they go into the community and perform their service learning.  What makes this concept even more unusual and fulfilling is its structured learning component.  The students participate in reflective seminars, offer oral presentations, conduct research, write papers, and read selected materials and literature that focus on the universal themes of man in his social context and the specific study of contemporary global and social issues.  This, in turn, affords the students the opportunity to integrate their community experiences into their English and Social Studies curricula.

This Program has created a link or "bridge" between the school and the community and places the students and the city of North Olmsted itself in both resource and beneficiary roles.  Data indicates that young people who perform voluntary service within an educational framework gain heightened self-esteem, sensitivity to others, social responsibility, civic participation, and "real world" experience.  Conversely, the young, elderly, ill, disadvantaged, and handicapped of North Olmsted and surrounding communities benefit from the thousands of hours of service the SITES Program provides to the area each year.

When I first started working on Butternut Ridge Cemetery to digitize the records I kept hearing about a SITES student the city had ,the previous year, that had been working with them on a study of the two city owned cemeteries. The students name was Phil Tomko.  He did a lot of work with and for the Cemetery Committee that was appointed by the city.  My coming to the city as a volunteer fell right into place with part of what was planned. Jeff did a lot of ground work on getting Butternut and Coe cemeteries preserved. At about the same time, I joined the Olmsted Historical Society who, I found out later, had a Cemetery fund started. OHS has been getting more donations to help preserve the cemeteries and we now have an active committee. This is also when Sandi's project was started to have a spokes person for the cemeteries. She represents all the little children in our cemeteries.  I still am working on the cemetery database it is a much bigger project than we ever thought. 

If anyone ever wonders about the good that the SITES Program does you can point to what Phil Tomko started.   At Frostville we have always appreciated what has been done for us.