Students Donate Time to Help Better Community

students will spend Friday volunteering their time to help better the greater Rocky Hill area.

The annual allows students the opportunity to give back to the community, teacher and organizer Kathleen Kennedy said.

“They are offering their time and talents to the greater Rocky Hill community,” Kennedy said.

The event was started 12 years ago by Kennedy, Jeanette Fraulo, Kim Antol and former Vice Principal and current Principal Donna Hayward.

“It’s not a day off,” Fraulo said. “It is a day of community service.”

The event started with about 100 students and 10 sites. On Friday, 371 students and 50 parent chaperones will be cleaning up sites from Rocky Hill to Manchester to Higganum to Bristol.

“People come up to us to be a part of this,” Kennedy said. A parent chaperone will be at each site.

Students will be raking and doing general maintenance at and cleaning up . The volunteers will lend a hand at the , and convalescent homes in Rocky Hill.

Students will also volunteer their time outside of Rocky Hill at the in Manchester, the CRRA Trash museum in Hartford, the Carousel Museum in Bristol, the Hackney's Hope Farm in Middletown and the Whitney Ridge Stables in Higganum among others.

Students started preparing for the event on Sept. 13 when they lined up at 5:30 a.m. to have their choice of sites for . Each student donated two non-perishable food items, which were given to the . Over 700 food items were given to the food pantry, Kennedy said.

For the first time, students helped in other aspects of the event besides the cleanup. Kennedy said students helped collect cans, performed crowd control during signups, made confirmation calls to sites and helped students get on their proper buses Friday morning.

“We had them do some of the legwork,” Kennedy said. Ten to 12 “responsible” juniors and seniors were chosen to be staff leaders during the event.

At the end of the day, the students will return to the for an ice cream social and a report on how their cleanup efforts went.

“They are exhausted at the end of the day,” Fraulo said.