55.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Holy Name students keep on giving
Students at Holy Name of Mary School have been up to a lot of good lately. Through various charitable acts, they have been helping animals, the hungry and even children on the other side of the world.
Eighth-graders in the school’s chapter of the National Junior Honor Society are required to complete a community service project, but that is hardly a chore at a school where kindness and charity are taught from the first day. Several of these projects are under way, or have just recently been completed.
Trevor Bookman collected donations for Bobbi and The Strays, an animal shelter in Freeport. He put a box in the school’s lobby in December and got more than $200 worth of items including dog and cat food, leashes, bowls, towels and cleaning supplies. One parishioner from the church left a 50-pound bag of dog food.
Bookman brought the items to the shelter just before Christmas. He said he researched several places before settling on Bobbi and The Strays. “They seem very dedicated,” he said of the volunteers there. “They love animals. I did this project because I love animals.”
At home, he has a cocker spaniel-poodle mix named Emma, and a parakeet, Polly. He had other dogs in his house when growing up.
Andre Cisco and David Camulaire are working together to help the homeless in New York City. They are raising money for the Bread of Life soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
They will be raffling off four gift cards at school, and all proceeds will go to the soup kitchen. The cost is $1 for one chance, and 50 cents for a second chance. The boys noted that $1.50 is all it costs to provide one person a meal there.
Principal Richard McMahon noted that with cutbacks to the food stamp program recently, the boys’ project couldn’t come around a better time. “The lines at these soup kitchens are growing,” he said.
Cisco and Camulaire secured $25 gift cards for Toys R Us, iTunes, American Express and Game Stop. They have been selling tickets during lunch periods and will draw the winners this Friday.
“We’re planning to raise enough money to feed families,” Cisco said, noting that the boys don’t have a specific fundraising goal in mind. “It’s important to help out people who don’t have what we have.”
The boys are familiar with giving back. In fifth-grade, their class donated books to the same soup kitchen. Cisco volunteers his time in the school nurse’s office every week, and Camulaire helps out in a third-grade classroom. They also both spend time working with the pre-K students.
Melanie Torres and Sydney Bhojwani collected money for the Missionary Childhood Association, one of the many missions supported by the Catholic Church. The organization is based on the concept of “children helping children.”
The girls collected bottles and cans in the school cafeteria for about a month, then turned them for a nickel a piece. Each week, they went to the machines at King Kullen and raised a total of $70. The money was given to the church’s Parish Outreach Center, where it then went to the Diocese of Rockville Centre, and finally to the Catholic Church in Rome to be distributed to their chosen mission.
“We wanted to not only help kids, but we also wanted to help the Earth,” Bhojwani said about their project, which raised money through recycling.
Torres said that before they started collecting, they asked their fellow students to save their cans and bottles for their project.
McMahon said he is proud of the work his students have been doing to help others. He noted that through the new Common Core Learning Standards, students are being prepared for the real world, and that includes the concept of helping others. “These service projects are a perfect example of best practices in regards to this goal,” he said.
