NHS Service Clubs –

Students Find Many Ways To Serve The Community

By Jeff White

For many students at Newtown High School, community service is becoming less of a chore done on request and more of a way of life.

There are three official student clubs specifically for serving the world outside the walls of the high school: the Charity Club, Interact, and the Key Club. Each applies its good deeds in a slightly different way, giving students the ability to not only distinguish between them, but to chose the one that appeals to them the most. Add to these offerings both the Guidance Honor Association and the National Honor Society, each having service as a foundation, and a community service incentive sponsored by the PTA, and students have more ways than ever to give something back to Newtown.

“I think that it is becoming part of the culture,” says Julia-Jane McNulty, a senior who served as secretary to the Key Club last year. “It’s just something you do. I think kids realize that it’s important.”

The Key Club is the oldest service club in the high school; so old, in fact, that most people cannot remember when it was first instituted. The club couples traditional community service around Newtown with an active effort to bolster a social consciousness within the high school. An annual activity for Key Club members is baking cookies and other treats and delivering them to different faculty members in large wicker baskets.

The romance survey that the club performs every year has long been a favorite for love-struck students. Club members devise a love survey that is filled out by most of the student population, and when the results are tallied electronically, students are paired with their perfect matches.

Outside NHS, the Key Club sponsors food drives during Thanksgiving and Christmas, goes on walks to earn money for different medical disorders, and helps out with Habitat for Humanity projects. In the past, the club activities have benefited the Faith Food Pantry, and members have taught a variety of after school activities at local elementary schools and sold daffodils for the American Cancer Society, raising over $1,000 last year. 

This year, the Key Club is in a state of flux. For one thing, the longtime marriage between the club and Kiwanis International dissolved last year. Newtown High School social studies teacher Charles Mann hopes that the club might be able to join forces with the Lions Club. If not, club officers will explore ways of existing as a Key Club independent of outside organizations.

It will be up to the club, says Julia-Jane McNulty, a member since her freshman year, to get more students interested in it. This could prove a challenge considering all the different options opened to service-oriented students. Miss McNulty still thinks that this year’s membership list will be about the same as in previous years.

“I would like to promote the club more to the underclassman,” she says. “We need to think of some more interesting projects.”

The Charity Club

The newest service club at the high school is the Charity Club, formed last year in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, which washed its destruction over Honduras. Students took up clothing collections and sent them to the devastated country to comfort those left without homes.

This year, the Charity Club has the largest membership of any service club in the high school, between 35 and 40 volunteers. Its premise is to get students to agree collectively on a charity to support, and then to devise a way to earn money for that cause.

Over this past Halloween, the club organized a masquerade ball to raise money for East Coast Assistance Dogs, an organization that supplies canines for people who need help with their daily activities.

Upcoming events for the club include a potential fashion show, another clothing drive, a walk to support the fight against multiple sclerosis, and a food drive. According to club officers, success rests in keeping the activities inventive.

“We try to think of new things, not the same old things,” says senior Loren Coulter, one of three presidents for the club.

“We’re trying to get everybody involved in donating to good causes,” says senior Liz Kochuba, another president. “There’s so many people that are in need of things, I feel like we’re in such a wealthy community that we can give a little back.”

Reaching To The World

Interact members also look out at the community, but their sight goes a little further.

The service club places its emphasis on international community service, along with supporting various town activities. Vice President Ami Kilchevsky has provided such global service first-hand: last year he traveled to Mexico to make a delivery of water purifiers to villages with unsafe drinking water. 

“A lot of the clubs focus on Newtown, but you have to look at the larger picture,” says the three-year member. “I’ve always been a part of local community service, but I never even knew about international community service. It made sense, and it needed to be supported.”

Interact has just finished up with its Penny Wars, a challenge it posed to see which class could raise the most money… in pennies. Students deposited the copper coins in large water jugs placed in the high school’s front foyer; anything other than a penny would be subtracted from the class’ total.

In all, the club raised over $500 to buy a “Happy House” from the Happy House Organization for a family in Haiti.

Although the club does think globally, it has not forgotten the needs of Newtown. Members have volunteered extensively at Ashlar, thrown Mother’s Day parties at local elementary schools, conducted food drives, and members are currently planning to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, when that organization is next in Newtown building homes for low income families.

Interact has a partnership with the Newtown Rotary club, and members have spoken at Rotary meetings about the various activities they are doing.

“I think it is one of the most important things,” says Tracy Mulholland, Interact’s president, about the need for community service at NHS. “I think it’s really good, you get out in the world and help people around you. Not a lot of people do it unless they are required or have the opportunity to be in a club.”

Yet in Newtown, it seems that students are still performing community service, even if they are not in a club. Thanks can be given largely to the PTA, which each year sponsors a community service hours incentive. Students that log in over 100 hours of community service for the year will receive recognition for their efforts during the end-of-the-year awards ceremony.

Julia-Jane McNulty is a student volunteer coordinator for the guidance office and a community service representative for the PTA. She makes volunteer opportunities known to her fellow students by keeping a notebook in the career center filled with different town organizations that need help. She will receive phone calls from people needing volunteers, and she canvases the student body to fill that need.

Despite the onslaught of service clubs and students willing to donate their free time, Miss McNulty says that there are still many jobs out there for students to perform.

But she is happy with what she sees in her fellow students. “Overall, I think a lot of people volunteer,” Miss McNulty says. “[The trend] has really developed well.”