Sarah Pitcher-Hoffman can count herself as part of an elite club: teachers whose students have placed in the IWitness Video Challenge not once, not twice, but three times.

Pitcher-Hoffman’s student Shayna Kantor won third place in the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge. Her student last year, Lanna Knoll, and three years ago, Ruby Merritt and Ayva Schiff, were all regional winners in the challenge.

She has assigned the IWitness Video Challenge to her eighth grade history students at Berkshire Country Day School in Massachusetts every year since the challenge debuted in 2013, to connect and reinforce the Holocaust unit her students complete in seventh grade.

“Also, I feel that service and giving to the community is an important part of every student’s development and this project gives each student a way to do that individually with a project that has meaning to them,” Pitcher-Hoffman said.

The IWitness Video Challenge asks students to be inspired by testimonies of genocide witnesses and survivors in IWitness to create positive change in their community, and document their process in a short video.

Shayna was inspired by a Holocaust survivor testimony given in American Sign Language to teach basic ASL to kindergarten students. Shayna has been learning the language for two years. Through her project and video, she hoped to demonstrate the challenges deaf people go through and the importance of accepting their differences and making an effort to communicate with them.

This particular class was very mature and became passionate about the IWitness Video Challenge from the beginning, Pitcher-Hoffman said. She was impressed more of the videos than in any other year.

“I felt that this particular group of students got very involved in their communities and really wanted to reach out and make a difference,” she said.

Given her track record, it’s no surprise that Pitcher-Hoffman plans to enter the IWitness Video Challenge again next year for the fifth time.

“I think it is a good way to get students involved in service and to teach them about a history that cannot be forgotten,” she said.