Cate School

Service

Servons

Our motto is Servons, which is French for “Let us serve.” Taking responsibility and ownership in the maintenance of your quality of life teaches invaluable lessons, and it is a pillar of the Cate experience.

Cate is more of a big family than a small school. In a family, everyone helps out, and you explore the benefits of self interest in relation to community interest. You will be rewarded with responsibility and also get the opportunity to connect to the world around you through global community service initiatives. We log off, show up, and pitch in!

You can join one of the many civic or service organizations on campus. There are weekly service outings to organizations in Carpinteria and Santa Barbara where you can visit the elderly and disabled, read to children, or work on environmental improvement projects. Once a year the entire school devotes a full day to volunteering around town with your advisory groups during Community Engagement Day. Or you may want join the group who travels to Mexico to help with a community construction project through the Los Niños program. There are plenty of opportunities for you to show up!

Local Opportunities

Public Service Night is every Wednesday evening after sports. Students head in Carpinteria to volunteer at organizations that assist adults with disabilities, play games with seniors, connect with kids in transitional homes, and serve food to those in need. There is no school requirement for volunteering or joining Public Service Nights, yet the students max out all available spots every week!

Community Engagement Day is an opportunity to serve our local community by advisory group. The community spends the day in Santa Barbara County assisting with a variety of organizations on invasive species management, classrooms assistance, beach clean ups, food distribution, and so much more.

As an underclassman, you will share responsibility for basic chores around the Mesa, much the same way you may have chores at home. In the dorm, Seniors oversee freshman, sophomores and juniors who have daily dorm chores such as, cleaning the common room, vacuuming the halls, taking out the trash and recycle, and so on.

Additionally, each grade has larger campus chore each year. Freshman help out in the kitchen with kitchen crew which is overseen by our Prefects. While sophomores and juniors are waiters at formal dinners. Seniors supervise and help underclassmen, serve as teaching assistants, and often take additional leadership roles in the dorms and across campus.

Additional Opportunities

Los Niños is a biannual, 4 day service trip to Mexicali, Mexico where students have an opportunity to experience an international trip, perform service work in conjunction with the local community, and to work on their Spanish language skills (although, taking a Spanish course is not a requirement to attend).

In 2007, Cate joined Round Square, a worldwide network of of 150 innovative high schools in 40 countries around the world. All member schools share a commitment to the pillars known as IDEALS, which stands for Internationalism, Democracy, Environmentalism, Adventure, Leadership, and Service. At Cate you can attend regional and international conferences, go on intercultural exchanges, and participate in international service learning projects. Round Square students from other countries love their stays on the Mesa, and Cate students return from Round Square adventures broadened and deepened.

In 2016, Cate Round Square headed to Los Angeles for the regional conference, sent students to South Africa for a service-learning project, had summer exchanges in Peru and Australia, and sent a delegation to the Round Square International Conference in Switzerland.

Learn More

The Mark Metherell ’87 Memorial Service Challenge is a Cate School grant that enables students to do community engagement projects in the summer to support people, organizations, and communities in need. Volunteerism, potential to benefit others, sustainability, and vision are the primary criteria for selection. In the spirit of Servons, this grant is named in honor of Mark Metherell ’87, a member of the Cate Class of 1987.

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