Finn Bridgeford '18 changes out a ceiling tile in a Pingree Theatre bathroom.
Student Workers Give Back
Dignity, self-satisfaction at the heart of summer labor
Work, and the dignity that comes with it, is one of the core principles to a Christ School education. History Instructor James Uhler proudly helps implement that principle during the warmest months of the year. And he has some help. Uhler supervises a crew of current and former students who make up the Christ School summer work program.
The student workers complement Christ School's full-time maintenance team, and the manual labor that the boys put in is varied. It ranges from chores such as cleaning, moving, painting, demolition, and even minor construction. A smaller "yard crew" focuses on landscaping under the direction of Matt Knighton.
Collectively, the two groups are essential to bridging the gap between one school year to the next. And the summer work program is the best of both worlds for boys like Finn Bridgeford '18. There is compensation like any other summer job. But there is self-satisfaction, too. "It's a good feeling to look around and know that I'm partly responsible for the way everything looks," Bridgeford said.
Zach Pulsifer '17 was a Job Prefect as a senior. He felt so strongly about the value of on-campus labor that Pulsifer wrote an essay on the topic. "Even if most kids don't realize what we do, I can look at a wall I painted, for example, and it makes me feel good. This was my fourth summer on the work crew and it's always an interesting experience. The great thing is that no matter how much work we had to get done, it always got done."
Along with Pulsifer and Bridgeford, the individuals who have worked on this summer's work crew or yard crew include Wade Mouer '17 and his older brother, Jim '13, Zak Lintz '16, Siler Sloan '17, David Lopez '17, Jacob Dowler '19, James Lopez '19, T.J. Bell '19, Michael Mahoney '20, and Max Field '20.
"This all fits in with the school's history and tradition. Students have always had jobs on campus," Uhler explained. "While today it may be 15 minutes of cleaning in the morning before class or the dorm at night, in the early 1900s students managed the whole campus and farm as well as made crafts for Mrs. Wetmore to sell in the local community. Most of the buildings built in the first half of the 20th century were in part built by students alongside faculty. I am lucky to carry on the Greenie tradition of that dignity of labor."
