Project gets students to invest in service

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Academy students Logan Washington and Brenden Hamo are focused on the art of looming. 

Emily Priolo for South Texas Catholic
 

For a middle school classroom on a Friday, Janida De La Rosa’s class is incredibly peaceful and focused. The room is full of students sitting, quietly chatting and working with colorful hoops and yarn in their hands. They are all looming. Not for a home-economics class, but for a religion class. 

“We’ve been talking about the corporal works of mercy in class, but I wanted to get the students really involved in the works of mercy, not just talking about them,” said Janida De La Rosa, who teaches middle school religion and English classes at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Academy in Corpus Christi.

Teacher Janida De La Rosa displays winter hats made by her middle school students at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Academy. Students in De La Rosa's class are, in the top photo in next page, making hats for the homeless. In the front row, from left, are Samantha Salazar and Christabel Martin. In the middle row are Veronica Cortinas and Natalie Wolnik and Angel Gutierrez looks on from the back row. In the bottom photo, students Logan Washington and Joshua Benavides are focused on the art of looming.  Emily Priolo for South Texas Catholic

But rather than simply collecting money or making a single volunteer visit, De La Rosa’s students are hand-making warm, winter hats for the homeless in town. She wanted to find a project that “got the students more invested in serving others, not just buying toothpaste and diapers.”

Now that investment is playing out in weekly, after-school meetings where the middle school students of OLPH Academy can volunteer to loom hats for a couple of hours. Using looms and yarn donated by parents, over half of the middle school student body works to create these cozy gifts. 

 “I was particularly surprised by all the boys who wanted to loom!” De La Rosa said with a smile. “But they are great at it and seem to really like it.” 

De La Rosa admits that she, and the majority of her students, did not know how to loom before beginning the project. She laughs when she explains that she learned how to make the hats by watching YouTube videos and then taught her students based on what she learned in the videos. Looking around the room at how beautifully and efficiently the students loomed the hats, it seems like they certainly got the hang of it. 

In the first four weeks of their looming project, the students have created nearly 70 hats—surpassing their initial goal of 50. The students became so invested in the project that many even continued to work on making hats over the Thanksgiving break. 

“I had kids asking if they could take the looms home over the break so that they could keep working on making hats for the homeless,” De La Rosa said. 

Terrance Dandy, right, chooses a winter hat from an assortment of winter hats loomed by middle school students from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Academy. Students pictured behind him are, from left, Brenden Hamo, Logan Washington, Luke De Los Angeles, Ryan Secrest, Angel Gutierrez  and Natalie Wolnik. Mary Cottingham, South Texas Catholic

De La Rosa and her students distributed the hats in early December. They chose to give adult hats to the Mother Teresa Shelter and baby-sized hats to Corpus Christi Hope House. De La Rosa is clearly proud of all of the work the students have done in giving back to the community. 

“What is important to me in this project is to instill a little of the value of service to others. I want the students to know that they can always enact these corporal works of mercy, and they can just do a little thing like this. It doesn’t have to be big,” De La Rosa said.

Big or small, these hats are made with a great deal of joy by many young people at OLPH Academy. De La Rosa hopes that the hats can “provide a little warmth and hope” to those in Corpus Christi this winter season.