St. Alphonsus Students Spend Catholic Schools Week on Service Projects

St. Alphonsus students recently swapped their first period textbooks for an hour of service and prepared 100 lunches for the Bethlehem Haven women’s shelter in Pittsburgh.  

The sixth, seventh and eighth graders met in the school cafeteria to assemble ham and cheese, turkey and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as well as pack fruit, chips, bottled water and candy treats into brown bag lunches for their Catholic Schools Week service project.

The school PTG provided the sandwich ingredients and the students donated the rest.  Parent volunteers not only supervised the sandwich assembly line, but also delivered the brown bag lunches to the shelter in time for lunch, in accordance with Bethlehem Haven guidelines.  

Catholic Schools Week chair and chief sandwich supervisor Suzanne Maffei was inspired to create this student service project by her mother Dolores Maffei, a long-time Bethlehem Haven volunteer. 

The Maffeis are not the only St. Alphonsus family with ties to Bethlehem Haven. In fact, St. Alphonsus Church has a longstanding relationship with Bethlehem Haven dating back to October of 2001. That’s when parishioner and school parent Barbara Griffith began a church ministry to the shelter by organizing a monthly meal for residents. Her St. Alphonsus committee of about 12 volunteers prepares an entire dinner, delivers and serves it to Bethlehem Haven one Saturday every month. Other ministry groups have also joined in to create cards and centerpieces to accompany the monthly meal donation.  

Not to be outdone, the younger students at St. Alphonsus were also busy with their own Catholic Schools Week service project.  

While the older students were elbow deep in ham and turkey, they were busy creating “Valentines for Veterans” as an expression of their faith and good citizenship. PA State Senator Jane Orie sponsors this annual event by collecting handmade valentines and other small assorted gifts that are then delivered to veterans at local veteran’s hospitals on Valentine’s Day.

Catholic Schools Week began in 1974 as a joint project of the NCEA, the world’s largest private professional educational association and the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This year’s 39^thanniversary theme was “Faith, Academics and Service.”  

The theme focuses on three priorities that Catholic schools establish that make them stand out from other educational institutions. Children are taught faith—not just the basics of Christianity, but how to have a relationship with God. Academics, which in Catholic schools are held to very high standards, help each child reach his or her potential. Service, the giving of one’s time and effort to help others, is taught both as an expression of faith and good citizenship.

- Submitted by Jill Taylor, on behalf of St. Alphonsus. Have news you'd like to share with Patch readers? Email information and photos to at amyjo.brown@patch.com.

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