Hiatt Students Give a Day of Service to Their School
Hiatt students spent the day doing a variety of service projects at their school.
Friday was Service Day at Hiatt Middle School and the old saying that you can’t make mayonnaise without breaking some eggs came to mind as visitors approached the building early that morning. A clot of 8th gardeners, er, graders was outside getting their hands dirty in more ways than one as they painted terracotta pots and prepared a flower bed on the grounds.
Inside, students in Jenna Wilson’s English classroom were composing letters to military troops stationed overseas. Elsewhere other groups were painting signs for the school garden, painting murals in the gym and listening to presentations in the auditorium about different ways and means of volunteerism and why it matters.
“One of our major focus areas for this year is to make the community aware of the great things that are going on at Amos Hiatt Middle School. The unexpected outcome of this communication has been all of the ways that the community has reached out to help us in our efforts to improve. What started out as an attempt to share what we are doing has opened the door to showing our students everything we can do as a team with our community,” said Dr. Deborah Chapman, principal of Amos Hiatt Middle School.
Community Housing Initiatives, Inc. (CHI), working in partnership with Hiatt and Community Youth Concepts (CYC), was the driving force behind Friday’s event. CYC conducted the PowerPoint sessions in the auditorium that primed the pump grade by grade before the kids were deployed to the various service stations around the building and grounds.
“Our goal is to engage residents in implementing positive changes. The youth make up a large percentage of the neighborhoods we serve, so we know we can make a major impact by giving them the opportunity to plug in and make a visible difference,” said Emily Boyd, Neighborhood Engagement Coordinator at CHI.
This event also served as encouragement for the students to stay connected with summer volunteer opportunities through their neighborhood association, nonprofits in the neighborhood and other community events.
After a squad finished installing an artsy sculpted sign that read “No One Stands Alone” in a flower bed right outside a building entrance Friday morning, Lyn Marchant, Community Schools Site Coordinator for the East High Feeder Pattern, made some remarks to the group aimed at lending some context to the phrase. The sidewalk around her, a blank concrete slate just an hour earlier, was now filled with encouraging words brightly scrawled in sidewalk chalk, just like the cards inside that were piling up for delivery to faraway soldiers. The good feeling that Marchant was preaching to the choir began to spread. Everyone was in it together.
