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At Principia School in Town & Country, community service has long been an integral part of its philosophy. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors must complete at least 10 hours of service while seniors must serve at least 20. During most years, the school also offers the chance to serve abroad, building homes, playgrounds, and classrooms in underserved communities in the Dominican Republic and South Africa. The school strives to foster a culture of “service and selfless service, where our students are in natural inclination to think outside of themselves and to give,” says Lisa Johnson, director of student life programs at Principia’s Upper School.
For example, senior Hannah Wymer, who recently received the Sally King Community Service Award, focuses on local food access. Wymer volunteers for local food pantry Feed My People, as well as the Upper School’s vegetable garden, where she weeds, plants, trims, and waters; the school’s dining services then use the produce for meals.
“It’s so easy to think about your wants and needs,” Wymer says. “When you allow your perspective to shift to helping someone else, you become more emotionally vulnerable to the challenges that others are facing.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Whitfield School visual arts teacher Jim Daniels, who serves as an advisor for the student council. Daniels emphasizes that students should volunteer not just because it’s beneficial while applying to colleges but primarily to address real needs in the community. “Do it for more intrinsic motivations,” he says. “Help others because it’s the right thing, not because you think other people are going to praise you for it.”
The school’s Community Service Club, for instance, provides items to families in need by partnering with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri as part of the 100 Neediest Cases initiative. This spring, the school also hosted a canned food drive for Operation Food Search, which gathered more than 5,000 pounds of food—enough to serve more than 1,250 people.
Beyond school, Whitfield students find other ways to help: participating in a Red Cross blood drive, working with The Literacy Initiative to provide books to underprivileged children, creating thank-you cards for first responders and military personnel alongside Operation Gratitude, a drive for the St. Louis Alliance for Period Supplies.
Lutheran High School of St. Charles County hosts a day of service for juniors and seniors. During the pandemic, the school’s STEM and Robotics program also launched a “Help from Home” initiative, which produced more than 7,000 face shields for health care workers, first responders, and students and staff. Two hundred of the face shields were delivered to a hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana. Students also helped gather more than 1,000 pieces of gently used clothing to give to patients as they were discharged from hospitals.
Service is core to the school’s mission to shape well-rounded citizens. “We’re preparing students for life,” says Glenn Mahnken, Lutheran High School of St. Charles County’s director of community relations. “No matter what students do after they leave high school, these are lessons that they can take with them anywhere they go.”
