It takes a village

Every table in the lunchroom at the Francis X. Hegarty Elementary school was filled on Saturday and accompanied by the sounds of breakfast being served by the Island Park Kiwanis Club middle school Builders Club. The cooking started for Karen Davis, the president of the Island Park Kiwanis Club at 5 a.m. and at 6:30 a.m. she joined Kiwanis club members, school administrators and library board members also cooking up a storm at the elementary school.

This year was the first time the Kiwanis Club held the breakfast at the elementary school, said Davis, and in doing so it allowed for more community members to enjoy breakfast. In total, the club raised approximately $4,000 through 25 raffled baskets and admission fees for local community programs and scholarships. In addition, the club which nearly died out after the pandemic gained three new members, including the Village of Island Park mayor Michael McGinty.

“It was a marvelous event,” McGinty said, “The kids were simply outstanding. You had a couple of library trustees cooking, you had superintendent Randazzo cooking, his assistant superintendent was there. The kids make the whole event. They are just marvelous, it’s so enjoyable, such great company. So, it’s good kids and frankly, it bodes well for the future that they’re involved now.”

David commends everybody who came and ate or helped out in making the event successful, saying “I thank everybody in the community for coming out and supporting us and the Kiwanis and the kids. It was a really great event.”

The event helped the Builders Club gain valuable life skills, such as teamwork, responsibility, respectfulness and courtesy. Davis even helped a few nervous kids beforehand through role playing as server and customer, to model for them how to take orders and serve the food, which improved their people skills.

Davis stated that, “community service doesn’t have to start when you’re an adult, I think it’s great to get kids involved and hopefully that love and desire to help just kind of naturally continues through into adulthood.”

She also mentioned how it almost felt like a comeback event, since the club faced shut down after the pandemic due to a lack of members. “After the pandemic, there really wasn’t enough support and helping hands to really do anything of any magnitude,” she said, “So the fact now that we have, you know, 20 plus members, you know, you can’t do something like this on your own. As they say, it takes a village and, in this case, it was everybody coming together.”