During the challenging times of COVID-19, the students and staff in the Public Service Practicum, PSP, created a project showing their gratitude toward veterans for Veterans Day. 

 PSP is a class where the students’ grades are all based on community service projects in person. Due to COVID-19 affecting us in the world, students have found ways to be able to work through the challenges like in the Veterans Memorial Day project, as they still showed their gratitude for the troops. This year is Tim Sermak’s first year teaching PSP, and he dove into these challenges, making these projects due to the COVID circumstances . 

“It was definitely a challenge being a project based class having to do them all over Zoom,” said PSP teacher Tim Sermak. “These challenges have been very useful to the students in the class developing ideas such as leadership qualities getting it all done in two weeks.”

The process in completing the project was for the students in class to break out into three groups that covered three sections. The first group had donations. The next was the social media page, and lastly the thank you video. The donations group would go to local stores like Home Depot, Jewel, and Meijer to get gift cards. The social media campaign helped create awareness, and the video group helped get students and staff to say thank you for the veterans to see. Senior Oscar Calhoun helped on the video section overall mentioning the situation working together over Zoom.

“It could have been more organized if we were all together in class being able to contribute more effectively,” Calhoun said. “But, overall due to the situation, we accomplished our goal.”

Senior Hanah Kregel followed up about doing the project over Zoom as well.

“It was hard over Zoom, especially having one person speak up and take charge until everyone in the group was comfortable working and sharing ideas with one another,”  Kregel said.

Overall, this project was a success as the students faced many challenges. The students had a time constant of two weeks to start and finish this project as they came up with the ideas the way it should be done. If in class, the students had ideas of attending the donations and visiting the veterans showing their appreciation to them for what they have done protecting the country. According to those in the class, even though it wasn’t an in-person project that they hoped for, they were able to show the same amount of appreciation electronically developing creativity, leadership, working together, and time management skills. They showed how important it is to celebrate Veterans Day, even through the tough times our world is facing today.