Stevenson High School wins top national award for volunteerism

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Members of the Stevenson High School Students in Action team celebrate in Washington, D.C. after winning the Jefferson Award for public service. | Brett Erdmann~for Sun-Times Media

Updated: October 28, 2011 11:08AM

In only its second year as part of the competition, Stevenson has won the nation’s highest award for charity work among high schools.

Stevenson High School won the Jefferson Award and was presented with the honor in Washington, D.C. Billing it as “the Nobel Prize for public service,” the awards committee hands out Jeffersons in June to a variety of public figures, unheralded volunteers and corporations that exemplify community work — and one for the nation’s most giving high school.

For 2010-11, that school is Stevenson.

“I’m so thrilled,” said Cole Deloye, part of the Patriots’ most recent graduating class and one of the eight members of the Students in Action group that represented SHS at the ceremony. “We’re all so excited that we were able to win this year.”

Stevenson has earned a trip to Washington in both years it has participated with the Jeffersons, by winning the Chicagoland-Northwest Indiana Region competition. In 2010, the Patriots came back from the capitol without the hardware.

Kayla Reinherz, another recent grad and the only member of both years’ delegations, said she and her classmates put much more work into this year’s application, mainly because they better understood what the Jefferson committee was seeking.

“Last year, it was just an honor to be there,” Reinherz said. “Everyone was so surprised that we made it that far.

“This year, it was a lot more nerve-racking, because we were so much more involved in it, and everyone was so much more emotionally invested.”

While riding the bus from the National Building Museum, where the 39th annual Jefferson ceremony was held, back to the Mayflower Hotel where all the delegations stayed, Reinherz, Deloye and Brett Erdmann, Stevenson’s director of community service, spoke about the changes the school made in its second year of competition. Deloye said the biggest improvement was getting connected to the programs that the Jefferson judges prefer, and knowing what those judges like to see in presentations.

“They really wanted to see us get familiar with their own programs,” Deloye said. “This year we spent the entire year focusing on those things, and catering our presentation to the criteria the Jefferson awards look at.”

And what those judges saw was, in many areas, more money and more goods going into the hands of nonprofit organizations and the needy this year than last. As he reflected on winning likely the highest honor achievable in his field, Erdmann said the credit belonged primarily with his students.

“I think it’s just a real testament to the work the kids have done,” Erdmann said. “These aren’t just kids getting ready to do great things in the world, these are already kids doing wonderful things.”