Wayland Students Spend Their Summer Giving Back

Two hundred hours – otherwise known as 12,000 minutes or 8.3 days.

No, it isn’t a countdown or the length of a fabulous vacation, it’s the combined number of hours donated this summer by about 15 Wayland High School students who spent their time away from school doing everything from grooming horses at Pond Hollow Farm, to moving books at the Wayland Town Building, to plucking tomato worms off plants in the area community gardens.

The students took part in a summer community service program designed to help them meet their required community service hours for junior and senior privileges at Wayland High School, and, if coordinator Amy Schoeff had anything to say about it, create lifelong volunteers in the process.

“My goal is to get the kids to look at community service not just as something they need to get done,” said Schoeff, who works as a school nurse at WHS. “[I want them] to realize they have something to give.”

Schoeff said she has been volunteering for much of her life and it “feels to me like a selfish thing” to work with the kids on projects this summer because she got so much out of it herself.

“The best part was watching the kids get more comfortable with one another,” she said.

For sisters Megan Pierce, a rising junior, and Molly Pierce, a rising freshman, however, the best part was the feeling of helping out.

Megan, 15, and Molly, 14, said their mom originally encouraged them to participate in the summer program as a way to connect with the community. In the midst of connecting, they each found volunteering activities that they truly enjoy.

Megan said she really wanted to try working on a farm and was able to do so on several occasions this summer. Now, she hopes to continue.

“I didn’t think it was going to be as fun as it was,” Megan said. “This is just getting me started. It’s given me a base for more opportunities.”

Which is exactly what Schoeff hoped would happen.

Schoeff said she wanted to plant seeds of community service that would grow into a lifelong passion for volunteering, but it is a step-at-a-time process.

Schoeff focused on offering the participants a variety of volunteering opportunities that got them out of their immediate environments. The list of places they worked includes, among several others, Cradles to Crayons in Brighton, Gaining Ground in Concord, Pond Hollow Farm in Wayland, Drumlin Farm and Heard Pond. She said she reached out to organizations with which she had a prior relationship, but some organizations also reached out to her as the summer progressed.

This is the first summer Schoeff has operated the program, but she hopes to continue the efforts in a modified way into the school year. Busy student schedules will make the kind of volunteering they did this summer more difficult, but Schoeff said she wants to try to do more than drives or collections during the school year, which she fears many students have become “hardened to” because of their prevalence.

“I need to get the kids to commit to something,” she said. “To get the kids to realize that when they volunteer for something, they’ve made a commitment and someone is counting on them.”