An advisory class of Bloomington High School [BHS] seniors raised around $1,900 to build a bench at the Connect Transit stop near the school.
The students have been in the advisory group together since their freshman year in 2021.
BHS senior Jacqui Benson said their teacher, Noah Tang, does a lot of community outreach and community service, and brings that into the classroom.
“So it was always kind of an idea in the back of our minds since freshman year that we were going to kind of have a plan of doing something in the community,” Benson said.
Tang said the idea for the bench came from one of the students who noticed people would always stand to wait for the city bus.
Tang said the students were “so excited” to run with the idea of adding a bench.
“They were like, ‘We want to do something that will leave an impact on the school after we’re gone,” Tang said. “‘We're going to leave something behind.’”
Tang has worked with the local transit agency, Connect Transit, before and said he has not been successful in the past on getting benches at bus stops.
“So we decided that we are going to put a bus bench on school district property, a little bit farther away from the street, but still in sight of the bus,” Tang said.
Fundraising
The students in Tang’s advisory class were very involved with the fundraising.
Benson said her classmate Liam Taylor did most of the outreach for funding. Taylor spoke with BHS Promise Council, the Bloomington Education Association, District 87 and private donors.
Tang added a good portion of the donation for the bench was from the Bloomington High School Class of 1985.
Taylor is in Promise Council at BHS, and said “they were a really, really big donor.”
Both Taylor and Benson are involved in extracurriculars at BHS and said that helped them with this project.
“We really learned how to communicate with different adults and with different groups and [were] able to better approach them when asking for those donations and facilitate those conversations,” Benson said.
“I would say it definitely helped a lot being involved, just meeting and knowing people that were connected,” Taylor said.
Impact
Working on this bench project with their classmates brought a sense of pride for Benson and Taylor.
Taylor said on the first day of freshman year his classmates were too scared to talk to each other, and now every time he looks at that bench he will remember that class.
“I would agree,” said Benson. “I think it definitely is a sense of pride, and it's a reminder of all those memories, of everything that we did together.”
Added Tang, “I think the biggest thing that my students got out of this is that it doesn't have to be a massive project to make people's daily lives marginally better.”
Tang said he does not know of any other advisory class at BHS that has done a project like this, adding he plans to continue his new tradition of helping students figure out what they can do to make their school a better place.
