“You can’t just sit on the sidelines and hope that your community is going to be this ideal, wonderful place. It’s whatever you make it,” Wydown math teacher Joseph Sustar said.

Around 300 Clayton School District teachers and faculty gathered at the high school and at various neighborhoods across St. Louis to give back to the region, while also bonding as a Clayton community.

Rather than having the usual start-of-the-year meeting in the auditorium, Dr. Nisha Patel, the Clayton Superintendent, proposed a new idea. 

“I wanted this year’s theme to be ‘Our Legacy, Their Future – Forever Clayton,’” Patel said. “How do we come back together and really support all the [local] organizations?”

To accomplish this goal, she organized the event with several community service projects throughout St. Louis, ranging from cleaning and rebuilding neighborhoods affected by May’s tornado to packing boxes of food and other essential products for families in Clayton and St. Louis. Other activities included baking cookies and protein bars for the Evelyn House, a facility for families with terminally ill children.

“[These projects] are not just about us, [they are] bigger than us,” Patel said.

Clayton Band instructor Thomas Perry was a part of the team that baked treats.

“It [is] super important to make sure that as a society, we continue to look out for everybody. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your background is. [What is important] is we embrace one another and really try to lift everybody up,” Perry said.

The event was extra special for Perry, who lives an hour away from Clayton and is in his second year of teaching in the District.

“[It gave me the ability] to immerse myself in the community and spend more time getting to know the place that I chose to spend the rest of my career,” Perry said

This event’s outreach expanded past community service. It also wants to demonstrate to students what it means to be a strong member of the community. 

Tim Baker, a third-grade teacher at Meramec Elementary, partnered with another volunteer and packed boxes of food, cleaning products, and other necessities. 

“[This project] perpetuates a culture of mutual giving and compassion,” Baker said. 

Patel also mentioned Clayton’s profile of a learner and how teachers and faculty must demonstrate all the qualities to students.

“What are your actions speaking for the future? What ways can you continue to give and make the world a better place?” Patel said. 

This project, which Patel noted could develop into a tradition for Clayton, provides a significant amount of help for St. Louis, a city still recovering from a devastating tornado. Not only has this project provided needed essentials for families and helped clean-up the city, but it also models how scholars can become more valuable members of the community. Even so, Adam Bergeron, a science teacher at the high school who volunteered in Northern St. Louis on Friday, warns that there is still more to be done.

“This is something that we can’t just do one Friday morning. We have to do [this] time and time again to bring the community back to where it was before the tornado,” Bergeron said.