Midway High School Senior class ready to participate in first community service day event

WACO, Texas (KWTX) - About 600 Midway High School Seniors will be scattered across the Waco and Hewitt areas Wednesday to participate in community service at nearly 20 different locations.

This is the first Seniors Community Service day hosted by Midway High School. Students will be performing a variety of different tasks to lend a helping hand to nonprofits, churches, libraries, schools and nursing homes in the surrounding communities.

“I think it’s important for us to teach our kids before they graduate how to give back to the community... that part of being a citizen is not just working and living your life, but to help others and just how to be kind in general,” Midway High School Principal Alison Smith said.

She said, while other grades are testing for the day, the school wanted to find a way for seniors to spend the morning in a meaningful way.

That’s when they decided to do the community service event, the school surveyed community members in the area and found there was a great need for some helping hands and volunteers at multiple surrounding locations.

Nicole Miles, who is the college and career advisor, along with school staff organized the event to include 19 locations for students to sign up to help at.

“We felt like it was a good opportunity for our class to just step out for a day and serve our community,” Smith said.

Students will be doing maintenance, clean-up, gardening, painting and teaching nursing home residents how to use technology.

The Hewitt Public Library will be one of the spots where a group of students will be cleaning books and chairs, preparing the library for summer events. The library said they are appreciative of students help.

Midway senior Jonathan Granger said he’s excited to spend the morning serving the community with his classmates.

“To me, it means quite a bit because I don’t get to go serve with all these people,” he said. “I get some of them from outside of school because I know them as friends from other organizations and whatnot, but not as an entire class of 2023, so this is going to be fun.”

Miles said they hope to make the community service day for the senior class an annual event for future classes.

“Just looking forward to continuing to do it,” Miles said. “This is our first year, but hopefully more organizations will reach out to us, and we can continue to make an impact down the road.”

“Some of our younger grades, they’re up over 700, and so just thinking about the power that you can teach them teach them to be a helping hand in the community, too” Smith said. “It’s an opportunity for them to see things outside of just their small world of the school.”

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