As faculty member Sonja Czarnecki announced with pride during Morning Meeting, this year’s MLK Day of Service had 42 volunteers, a record-breaking feat for a relatively small school. So what made ⅕ of the entire student body decide they should jump out of their toasty beds and into the below-freezing cold? Why does service deserve such a sacrifice?
Seabury requires students to serve the community for a certain amount of time, and while the hours may seem high, the school offers many opportunities for completing them. Seventh grader Megan Rinnert rather likes this, saying, “For a lot of people, it gives them a good goal to set … I did Senior Living. I usually do MLK. Just any opportunity [that comes up].”
The hours usually accumulate over time. Junior Ethan Smith has helped “Coach Rios out with setting up for something, and I did one where we went out to the farm with a group of other high schoolers and cleaned up as a community service opportunity for everyone, and they gave us 25 hours for that. Lately over the summer, I have been doing camp with the arts center. It’s a camp for little kids, seven to 12 [year-olds]. Usually [I] help the kids do art, make sure the kids don’t eat the art supplies, that type of thing, just make sure the kids are safe.”
Similarly, eighth grader Lily Henderson shares her experience, saying, “Over the years, I’ve just done a lot of different things, like the concessions here. I pick up trash in my neighborhood. I do [projects] on Martin Luther King Day … I definitely look at the ones that Mme. Buckner sends out. I’ve done volunteering at festivals. I’ve [helped] at HyVee.” As a result, she has completed the middle school goal of “20 plus [hours] both years.”
Sometimes, a big project can boost the hour count. Senior Riley O’Neill has “around 950” service hours, and she explains that most of them come from “a summer camp that I went to when I was younger. I volunteered there as an assistant counselor for a week at a time during the summer … They have this program … where teenagers can volunteer and help at camp, and a lot of my friends do it too. So I would basically do dishes, clean up, take care of kids and basically just do all of the crappy work that none of the counselors want to do … I decided it was something I was interested in, and originally, I didn’t even realize that it would be community service hours, because … I wasn’t even at Seabury [then]. But then I realized, and I was like, ‘wait, this is kind of genius!’ I reached my graduation requirement freshman year,” she says.
O’Neill’s commitment shows that the requirement is not just for checking tasks off of a list. Rather, it motivates students to serve whenever they can. Rinnert, a recipient of last year’s Gold Star Service Award, says, “I don’t really think about how many hours I have. I kind of just think ‘this sounds fun.’” Naturally, work is central to service, and it is not usually so easy. However, Rinnert encourages people to “just go and do it. The worst that can happen is you don’t enjoy it, but at the end of the day, you might be helping someone out, and you might make someone’s day by doing it … Just [be] positive. If someone needs you to do something, do it,” she says.
A good attitude transfers to the tedious task of entering hours. Freshman Liam LeDosquet says, “It usually makes me think back about everyone that I helped.” After he “went with my church and picked up garbage around a lake,” LeDosquet shares that “the [question] about the community [made me realize] we are pretty dirty sometimes with the trash that we just dump on the ground.”
Likewise, Rinnert says, “When you have to fill out [questions] like ‘how did this change you?’ I think that’s really good to reflect on the things that you’ve done and might even motivate people to do it more.” She is involved with Theatre Lawrence’s Penguin Project, a project that gives “people with intellectual disabilities the chance to do theatre,” and she says that an experience like that “helps you understand what other people go through and gives you the chance to contribute to them.”
Finally, it is vital to know that no one is above service. As O’Neill puts it, “Always be willing to try it, even if it sounds gross. I wasn’t super excited to cut down honeysuckle trees, and then after doing it, it was super fun because I got to do it with my advising. So, just keep a good attitude, even if it’s not a super glamorous activity.”
