Student Service Hours
We want to give a huge shout out and thank you to the National Honor Society students and teacher sponsors at Lake Highlands High School. Three years ago, this organization helped us with our Annie’s Kids’ Christmas present distribution, and they have been helping us ever since! All the NHS students we have interacted with are fantastic - they are leaders, initiators and influencers.
In October FLH co-hosts a Fresh Food Day event, and NHS collects crackers, chips, pretzels, fruit snacks, granola bars, etc. for 300 give away snack packs. They decorate the sacks with cute fruit and veggie pictures and sayings, fill the sacks with all the goodies and distribute them during our festival. They also serve alongside us in our veggie painting and game playing booths, along with helping affix food-focused tattoos to young kids faces and arms! And then there is the cleanup at the end of the day – yay for extra hands and feet!
In December, the NHS students rise early on a Saturday morning and come to the New Room Community Center to distribute Christmas presents to families from throughout the community who have registered with Annie’s Kids at Lake Highlands UMC. The students provide activities for the kids while moms and dads wait in line to receive the presents, and everyone enjoys freshly baked cookies from “the elves” in the kitchen!
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the high school students come to play board games and help with homework at our EPIC After School Club. Because of the NHS support, we have extended our club hours by 60 minutes! The mommas are so happy to have an extra hour to themselves before coming to New Room for pickup at 6pm. I know the EPIC kids love their leaders, but I also know how much they enjoy reading and playing games with “friends” under the age of 20!
Last Sunday, NHS students started coming to help with our New Room Community Church children’s choir program. And Paxton and Rebecca can sing! What a blessing for our non-singing and rhythmically challenged choir leader! Another NHS student, Drew, prepared our sack lunches for the choir and youth group, set-up our room, served us lunch and reset the room when we finished choir.
How sweet it is to have this partnership expand to every aspect of our ministry. I hope our FLH children have more time with these student leaders who bring new energy and enthusiasm with them into the New Room. These young leaders have become role models that our students can strive to be, and I hope these students love our ministry work so much they keep coming even after their service hours requirements have been fulfilled.