He walks around the park with a blue shirt on his back, trash bag in his hand and mud clumps on his shoes. Senior Cole Collier, and 400 other students, volunteered on March 9 for Mansfield ISD’s annual Day Of Service hosted by Legacy Student Council. All five high schools and two middle schools worked all around Mansfield picking up garbage, working at food banks, volunteering at animal shelters and coming together at the park to eat lunch.
“It’s our yearly service experiment with the community where we go around Mansfield and just beautify and make it a better place,” Collier said. “I think all the students at Legacy look forward to it. I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t know what it is and people who know what it is, They’re always like ‘Where do I sign up? Where do I turn in my permission slip?’ There are always people who really want to do this. I think this is just a great place for the students to all come together under a common goal and just do something that we really enjoy, and just make where we live, make it better for us and the rest of the community.”
Student Council created Day of Service in 2018, when they wanted to do a project that the whole district could partake in. The idea was created for juniors and seniors to get more volunteer hours but has grown all the way down to the middle schools. Teen Leadership teacher and Student Council advisor Kenna Canvar looks forward for the participation numbers to increase.
“I think it’s a day people look forward to, especially if they’ve gone before. We have noticed if you’ve done it before, everybody wants to come back. I think it makes us feel proud about who we are when we go out and work,” Ms. Cavnar said. “And the other students and other campuses have heard about it, so they want to go and so I think it can get bigger. My hope is that one day we’ll have all the middle schools and all the high schools out on one single day, volunteering across Mansfield.”
This year, participants volunteered across Town Crossing Park, Rose Park and all the way to McKnight East Park picking up trash. Vacant lots near construction sites, Mansfield Thrift Store, Harvesting in Mansfield Food Bank, and Mansfield Service Center painting rocks. In previous years, local restaurants like In-N-Out catered the event, but this year Mansfield Code Compliance department provided hotdogs and beverages for all participants.
“I hope that each individual gets something out of it. They realize that it’s fun to give back. It’s really trying to train students to do community service, to give back because it’s what we need to do collectively as a people,” Ms. Cavnar said. “I think it’s important. As a teacher, I feel I have to model that and so we do a lot of these kinds of things because I want my kids to understand that part of their responsibility of being in this community. Mansfield, Texas, the United States, is you do have to give back. That’s something we have to learn early. So that’s why we want to get middle schools involved to train them. And I hope it gives them a lifelong desire to be a part of community service. This is just the beginning.”
Principal Dr. Stephanie Bonneau attended the Day of Service to support the student council and students. She hopes the students that attended continue to lend a helping hand to the organizations they volunteered for.
“Day of Service has two purposes for me. One is there are always organizations in the community that need support. And we have a wealth of help on hand and are able to support so it’s a way for us to support the community as a district. The second purpose is sometimes just humans and especially teenagers,” Dr. Bonneau said. “It’s hard to remember that we’re really all a part of something greater than ourselves and that sometimes we help others just as a way to, help others, not for anything that we get out of it. So hopefully that’s what all of our teenagers got out of today, and all of our community spot places that we went to sponsor got a benefit from that as well.”
Student council plans to host Day of Service again next year and hopes to expand the number of participants and magnify their impact to the community.
“It’s helped me feel more connected to my community, and I didn’t really feel like as much of a good citizen until I started doing this. I just felt like I was really giving back to the community,” Collier said. “I just see a really positive impact and even the workers that we’ve been working with, at the Mansfield thrift they’re just so wonderful and seem so happy to just have us here and the opportunity is just great. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and ask me what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and where we’re from. It just feels like a really big connection.”
