Berks' Best 2025 Taylor Seitzinger Community Service and Leadership winner: Garrett Hyneman has dedicated his life to helping others
Garrett Hyneman knows that learning extends far beyond the classroom.
It's something that the Gov. Mifflin High School senior has seen firsthand since he was around 7 years old. That's when he first joined the Cub Scouts and discovered the joy of being of service to others.
Over the year, his passion for community service and leadership has only grown, becoming an intrinsic part of who he his.
'My life purpose is to make a positive difference to the most number of people I can,' he said.
That mindset, and his willingness to back it up with action, has earned Hyneman the distinction of being named the winner of the 2025 Berks' Best Taylor Seitzinger Community Service and Leadership Award.
'In my 27 years of teaching, I have encountered many outstanding students, but Garrett stands out as one of the most driven and involved individuals I've ever had the pleasure of working with,' Kristi Jo Bonanno, Gov. Mifflin's internship and school-to-work program coordinator, said in a letter supporting Hyneman's nomination. 'He takes full advantage of every opportunity presented to him and approaches each with remarkable initiative and passion.'
That has led Hyneman to be incredibly busy, with running through the list of projects and activities he has been involved with enough to make most people's heads spin.
Take, for example, his Eagle Scout project. As someone who is extremely passionate about preserving and protecting the environment, he got 80 homeowners on a local street to band together and beautify their neighborhood by planting two dozen shade trees.
That led to another project, this time working within the Gov. Mifflin School District to plant trees. Starting with the high school and middle school campuses, he has been soliciting donors — who can pay $250 to have a plaque installed — to cover the costs.
'The goal is to beautify the campus and recognize donors who are able to honor somebody special in their lives,' Hyneman said. 'It's a passion project, and it's 100% student-run.'
That project is in the planning stages for phase two, which will see trees planted at Cumru Elementary School.
'The ultimate goal is to get the students there a step closer to being steward of the environment,' he said.
Hyneman is also a member of several local community organization. He sits on the youth advisory board of the Berks County Community Foundation, where he has worked to battle food insecurity and to protect the environment, and as a member of What's Up Berks has been helping to lead an effort to ban single-use plastic bags in the county.
He has also created his own What's Up Berks youth board at Gov. Mifflin, which helped the district transition from using plastic utensils in its cafeterias to using metal versions. The switch will help protect the environment, he said, and save the district about $30,000.
Hyneman said he plans to continue his community service and leadership work as he heads off to college this fall at Lehigh University. There, he will study mechanical engineering with a focus in the environment and sustainability.
'I'm really interested in getting involved in the realm of green energy,' he said. 'I'm doing college research on a thermal electric generator. I'm working on a patent. I'm trying to create a more environmentally friendly, more efficient model.'
Hyneman said he is also interested in getting involved with politics, saying he feels he can make the biggest impact on the world that way. And, he said, his long-term plans include trying to give back to the community by becoming an educator.
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Commentary: Why nostalgia for the 1950s of ‘Leave it to Beaver' persists in America's religious right
Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching 'Leave It to Beaver' stoned. Which is what I did with an old friend in the 1980s while attending graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley. Nostalgia for the '50s — that land beyond time where Catholic traditionalists such as Notre Dame political theorist and post-liberal prophet Patrick Deneen dwell — idealizes imaginary communities of yore such as Mayfield, the setting for 'Leave it to Beaver,' where the values of faith, family, friends and flag all flourished. According to this narrative, late-stage liberalism and the globalization of markets, with their characteristic rootlessness, dissolve this communal existence. When I was at Berkeley in the 1980s, a large number of my childhood friends from Princeton, New Jersey, somehow found their way to the Bay Area. One afternoon, one of my Princeton buddies was house-sitting for an uncle in a Bay Area suburb. The uncle, whom I'll call Uncle Jim, had been my Cub Scout pack leader in Princeton when I was in elementary school. One sun-drenched afternoon, my friend and I settled into a couch, he rolled some joints and we flipped the TV to 'Leave It to Beaver' reruns. The series, on the air from 1957 and 1963, is a resonant symbol of '50s nostalgia, one to which conservative Catholics have returned as a template for modeling natural law. To Catholics who moved to the suburbs in the '50s and '60s, 'Leave It to Beaver' was a 'medieval morality play,' as Jerry Mathers, the Catholic actor who played young protagonist Theodore 'Beaver' Cleaver, put it. The show was a guide for young souls more tethered to television than to the suburban church. Michael De Sapio, writing in the online journal The Imaginative Conservative in 2017, states that, according to Mather, Beaver Cleaver 'repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue.' In other words, these archetypal storylines and characters represent a moral imagination that 'elevates us to first principles as it guides us upwards towards virtue and wisdom and redemption,' in the words of American philosopher Russell Kirk. De Sapio continues: 'The emphasis on decorum and good manners in the Cleaver family conveyed a vision of the good, true and beautiful.' Mathers shared that the casting directors for the show selected him to play Beaver when they asked where he would prefer to be after they noticed he was uneasy at the audition. His guileless reply: his Cub Scouts den meeting. Notably, the mission of the Scouts is to 'prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.' Which returns us to Uncle Jim, my former Cub Scouts leader. He was an electrical engineer who ended his first marriage and moved to California in the 1970s, where he married a woman several decades younger and shed the trappings of his formerly decorous identity. 'Leave It to Beaver' mirrored and shaped the aspirations of millions of Catholics moving to the suburbs after World War II, and it has lingered as an idealized — and exclusive — depiction of the American Dream. The only nonwhite characters to appear in the show's 234 episodes were a Black man exiting a dairy truck in the episode 'Eddie, the Businessman' (1962) and a Black actress who plays a maid in the 1963 episode 'The Parking Attendants.' Within months of its final episode in June 1963 — following the March on Washington, D.C., in August led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the November assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 'Leave It to Beaver' had become a charming artifact of mid-century optimism, more a product of nostalgia and romantic imagination than a realistic model for America's future. _____ Peter H. Schwartz writes at the broad intersection of philosophy, politics, history and religion. He publishes the Wikid World newsletter on Substack. _____
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Peter H. Schwartz: Why nostalgia for the 1950s of ‘Leave it to Beaver' persists in America's religious right
Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching 'Leave It to Beaver' stoned. Which is what I did with an old friend in the 1980s while attending graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley. Nostalgia for the '50s — that land beyond time where Catholic traditionalists such as Notre Dame political theorist and post-liberal prophet Patrick Deneen dwell — idealizes imaginary communities of yore such as Mayfield, the setting for 'Leave it to Beaver,' where the values of faith, family, friends and flag all flourished. According to this narrative, late-stage liberalism and the globalization of markets, with their characteristic rootlessness, dissolve this communal existence. When I was at Berkeley in the 1980s, a large number of my childhood friends from Princeton, New Jersey, somehow found their way to the Bay Area. One afternoon, one of my Princeton buddies was house-sitting for an uncle in a Bay Area suburb. The uncle, whom I'll call Uncle Jim, had been my Cub Scout pack leader in Princeton when I was in elementary school. One sun-drenched afternoon, my friend and I settled into a couch, he rolled some joints and we flipped the TV to 'Leave It to Beaver' reruns. The series, on the air from 1957 and 1963, is a resonant symbol of '50s nostalgia, one to which conservative Catholics have returned as a template for modeling natural law. To Catholics who moved to the suburbs in the '50s and '60s, 'Leave It to Beaver' was a 'medieval morality play,' as Jerry Mathers, the Catholic actor who played young protagonist Theodore 'Beaver' Cleaver, put it. The show was a guide for young souls more tethered to television than to the suburban church. Michael De Sapio, writing in the online journal The Imaginative Conservative in 2017, states that, according to Mather, Beaver Cleaver 'repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue.' In other words, these archetypal storylines and characters represent a moral imagination that 'elevates us to first principles as it guides us upwards towards virtue and wisdom and redemption,' in the words of American philosopher Russell Kirk. De Sapio continues: 'The emphasis on decorum and good manners in the Cleaver family conveyed a vision of the good, true and beautiful.' Mathers shared that the casting directors for the show selected him to play Beaver when they asked where he would prefer to be after they noticed he was uneasy at the audition. His guileless reply: his Cub Scouts den meeting. Notably, the mission of the Scouts is to 'prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.' Which returns us to Uncle Jim, my former Cub Scouts leader. He was an electrical engineer who ended his first marriage and moved to California in the 1970s, where he married a woman several decades younger and shed the trappings of his formerly decorous identity. 'Leave It to Beaver' mirrored and shaped the aspirations of millions of Catholics moving to the suburbs after World War II, and it has lingered as an idealized — and exclusive — depiction of the American Dream. The only nonwhite characters to appear in the show's 234 episodes were a Black man exiting a dairy truck in the episode 'Eddie, the Businessman' (1962) and a Black actress who plays a maid in the 1963 episode 'The Parking Attendants.' Within months of its final episode in June 1963 — following the March on Washington, D.C., in August led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the November assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 'Leave It to Beaver' had become a charming artifact of midcentury optimism, more a product of nostalgia and romantic imagination than a realistic model for America's future.
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Berks' Best 2025 Taylor Seitzinger Community Service and Leadership winner: Garrett Hyneman has dedicated his life to helping others
Garrett Hyneman knows that learning extends far beyond the classroom. It's something that the Gov. Mifflin High School senior has seen firsthand since he was around 7 years old. That's when he first joined the Cub Scouts and discovered the joy of being of service to others. Over the year, his passion for community service and leadership has only grown, becoming an intrinsic part of who he his. 'My life purpose is to make a positive difference to the most number of people I can,' he said. That mindset, and his willingness to back it up with action, has earned Hyneman the distinction of being named the winner of the 2025 Berks' Best Taylor Seitzinger Community Service and Leadership Award. 'In my 27 years of teaching, I have encountered many outstanding students, but Garrett stands out as one of the most driven and involved individuals I've ever had the pleasure of working with,' Kristi Jo Bonanno, Gov. Mifflin's internship and school-to-work program coordinator, said in a letter supporting Hyneman's nomination. 'He takes full advantage of every opportunity presented to him and approaches each with remarkable initiative and passion.' That has led Hyneman to be incredibly busy, with running through the list of projects and activities he has been involved with enough to make most people's heads spin. Take, for example, his Eagle Scout project. As someone who is extremely passionate about preserving and protecting the environment, he got 80 homeowners on a local street to band together and beautify their neighborhood by planting two dozen shade trees. That led to another project, this time working within the Gov. Mifflin School District to plant trees. Starting with the high school and middle school campuses, he has been soliciting donors — who can pay $250 to have a plaque installed — to cover the costs. 'The goal is to beautify the campus and recognize donors who are able to honor somebody special in their lives,' Hyneman said. 'It's a passion project, and it's 100% student-run.' That project is in the planning stages for phase two, which will see trees planted at Cumru Elementary School. 'The ultimate goal is to get the students there a step closer to being steward of the environment,' he said. Hyneman is also a member of several local community organization. He sits on the youth advisory board of the Berks County Community Foundation, where he has worked to battle food insecurity and to protect the environment, and as a member of What's Up Berks has been helping to lead an effort to ban single-use plastic bags in the county. He has also created his own What's Up Berks youth board at Gov. Mifflin, which helped the district transition from using plastic utensils in its cafeterias to using metal versions. The switch will help protect the environment, he said, and save the district about $30,000. Hyneman said he plans to continue his community service and leadership work as he heads off to college this fall at Lehigh University. There, he will study mechanical engineering with a focus in the environment and sustainability. 'I'm really interested in getting involved in the realm of green energy,' he said. 'I'm doing college research on a thermal electric generator. I'm working on a patent. I'm trying to create a more environmentally friendly, more efficient model.' Hyneman said he is also interested in getting involved with politics, saying he feels he can make the biggest impact on the world that way. And, he said, his long-term plans include trying to give back to the community by becoming an educator. Related Articles * May 16, 2025\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009Berks' Best 2025 mathematics winner: Jasper Platt intrigued by the theoretical side of math\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009 * May 16, 2025\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009Berks' Best 2025 communications winner: Sydney Guida has a passion for storytelling\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009 * May 16, 2025\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009Berks' Best 2025 career and technical education winner: Devra Longacre headed toward bright future\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009 * May 16, 2025\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009Berks' Best 2025 overview: 418 students nominated for 11 awards\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009\u0009
