Dear Key Club, I am so glad to be able to share this newsletter with you and be able to share all of our fun activities!
The first six weeks of school just passed and we are starting to get discouraged but we’ve got this! Keep on working and serving your community. Work to do your best and let’s have a great year.
By Your Editor, Emily Rodriguez
September was an incredible month for Key Club at Randall High School. A large number of students are involved and appear to really like the group. Every day, Mrs. Shipley and our board members put in a lot of effort to improve Key Club. What this year has in store for Keyclub has me very thrilled. There were numerous activities available, including the Triathlon, the Blood Drive, Fill With Hope, the Washington Avenue Service, and Gene Howe Folders. This month, I took part in a lot of activities, but my favorite was the Tanglewood Lake Triathlon. The triathlon has three activities involved, biking, swimming, and running. Numerous new people and students from various schools were introduced to me. We were assigned to make the food for the racers after they were finished racing. While the other students created Frito pies, we made barbecue sandwiches and added chips, a drink, and a treat. We continued to work hard to be able to finish in time and have happy customers. I also got the opportunity to see the swimmers race, since it was really chilly that day I thought it must have been very challenging for them. People began to arrive once all of the races were over; they were all bright red and sweating. We knew that many of them were hungry and tired, so we tried our best to cheer them up. The staff, people, and pets were all fun to talk to; it was very nice being able to help whenever someone needs it. I enjoyed it a lot and got to learn how to make BBQ sandwiches and Frito pies. Gene Howe folders are another one of my favorite activities to do all school year. You get to get help the teacher put in papers for the little kids every Monday. Since it is quick and simple, I urge every Key Club member to go do it if they are unable to participate in another activity. We typically finish in 5 to 10 minutes, and it's fantastic to chat with the other team members in the meanwhile. There are many more things to do that are both fun and good for the community. After all, helping others is all that the key club wants to do. We want to be able to accomplish more and be more successful. Key Club this year is going to be adventurous, we love making a change and representing Randall High School.
I am made from something clean, my life is short lived,
can come up but never come down, what am I?
This year has already been exciting. Meetings have been very successful and we have been having fun at every meeting with icebreakers, including a rock, paper, scissors tournament where the winner got a gift bag full of goodies. We also have a raffle for a free hour at the beginning of every meeting which creates an incentive to come to meetings and add more fun to the meeting. Also at every meeting we have members bring snacks so people can eat and enjoy a cookie (or four) while attending the meeting. Having snacks is just one of the constant things we provide each week during the meeting. During meetings, there is always constant opportunities for members to get hours. Every month, Key Club volunteers at Fill With Hope, which is our districts version of Snack Pak 4 Kids. The first or second Monday and Tuesday of each month, we go and fill bags for the many schools in our district. Fill With Hope has been one of our constant service opportunities that everyone enjoys going to. This helps our community in so many ways. Fill With Hope helps kids who don’t always have food at home and make sure they don’t go hungry over the weekends. These snacks that are given to kids help the kids in so many ways. If kids don’t have to worry about the hunger they feel, they can focus more on enjoying their life and learning more in school. Also, the people who run it are the kindest people out there and it’s always a joy to go and volunteer there and it only takes an hour to make sure a child doesn’t go hungry. The amount of students struggling with food scarcity is overwhelming and Fill With Hope is helping change that.
Having these opportunities every week and every month is what keeps our community alive and serving. Helping students out is one of the biggest things we do. The district project being Supporting Education is so fitting for us. There are many ways we plan to help our school and other schools in our district like having drives for school supplies to help teachers and students. There are many teachers and students who struggle to provide supplies or have supplies for all of their classwork and we want school to be as stress free as possible by helping out those who need help. Overall, this year we plan to foster a love of helping others and our peers in our members and community by volunteering at Fill With Hope throughout the year and helping out teachers and students with school supplies.
Monday, October 3rd, 17th, and 24th - Gene Howe Folders (4:00-4:45 PM)
Thursday, October 6th - Kiwanis Meeting (6:30 AM)
Monday, October 10th and Tuesday, October 11th - Fill with Hope (4:30-5:30 PM)
Saturday, October 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29thWashington Avenue Family Service Center (8:30-10:30 AM)
Friday, October 14th - Falcon Fest
Thursday, October 20 - Pumpkin Painting Social (AFTERSCHOOL)
Other Events and Dates
Kiwanis Meeting 6:30am
WashingtonAve. Family Service Center 4:30-6:30
Friday Saturday
13
WashingtonAve.
Family Service Center 4:30-6:30
Falcon Fest 6:00-8:00
1 WashingtonAve. Family Service Center
8:30 am - 10:30 am
8 WashingtonAve. Family Service Center
8:30 am - 10:30 am
Gene
WashingtonAve.
Family Service Center 4:30-6:30 Painting Social Afterschool
WashingtonAve. Family Service Center 4:30-6:30
15 WashingtonAve. Family Service Center 8:30 am - 10:30 am
22 WashingtonAve. Family Service Center 8:30 am - 10:30 am
29 WashingtonAve. Family Service Center
8:30 am - 10:30 am
By: Emily Rodriguez
September is a great time of the year! School is in, falls about to begin, summers hotness is ending. All so sweet because cozy weather is coming. We are ready to post our pumpkin spices on the good old Instagram. All over social media you could tell everyone is ready. Social media is a great way to share and reach out to many people. It’s a great way to communicate with anyone! We at Randall High School like to use social media to communicate with people at our school and spread the word about Key Club. Not only a great way to communicate but to share all the great things we do by helping out our community. We are able to remind other fellow students who are involved Key Club about our meetings and future events, all thanks to the help of social media. With the help of social media we were able to promote such a good show for our Blood Bank at school. We were able to promote it wonderfully by being able to share many posts for people to come donate. There was so many people donating. It was such a great thing to see how many people were wanting to donate. We had a great showing. “It’s a wonderful thing that this many people showed up to the Blood Drive to donate blood”, said a nurse there. Many people were learning what blood type they were, many had laughs, and overall it was such a great success to see our own school helping out!
Our Key Club has just done such a great job at showing our school the importance of volunteering and helping out the community. Even the Key Club has had a great outturn. Many new faces are joining and with our meetings every week we are able to share more and more. Key Club is teaching them how to volunteer without being told. No one is forcing anyone but with our great environment they are happy and willing to join. I’m so happy I joined Key Club because it has taught me many life lessons and also showed me to care for my community.
I want to keep on sharing as much with my school and community over how great Key Club is at being involved and always being there happy to help. I am so happy to be apart of this club and it’s great successes.
Washington Family Service Center is an outreach ministry of Washington Avenue Christian Church that gives food and clothes to people who need them. When someone goes there in need of help or to volunteer they are greeted with open arms as one might be family. A man named Darnel is the director of the service center and allows for an enjoyable experience when I volunteer. One can help in areas such as the clothing department, working front, carting food out, and packing sacks of food which are self-explanatory with many other helpful volunteers to walk you through it. The way people get food and clothes is through “blue cards” which are little blue cards that say, basic identifying information, how many visits they have left in the year, and how many clothes visits they have.
This volunteer spot is a good area to get hours as they serve people Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and a good place to meet people to talk about their stories with them. I have been volunteering for almost 3 years and the rewards have appeared because they have been noticeable and immense. One of these is creating new friendships that have personally affected me as one of my closest friends, Savanna, was only met because I went to the service center to volunteer. Another would be that it’s a safe place to talk and create an environment to boost my confidence and my overall happiness. The workplace this gives you is welcoming but also can get you ready for real jobs through a fast-paced environment with prepping food bags to talking with consumers for job experience.
Through my time volunteering, I have seen a massive increase of success in people who volunteer short-term and long-term with scholarships, job applications, and tournament successes. Many resumes are boosted above others when volunteer hours are added as to show commitment and dedication to a cause that jobs and colleges will want to see. One of these was Apollo the valedictorian of 2021-2022 who I believed volunteering gave him many benefits towards his future goals of the airforce and maybe the space force. As I have talked about during my essay volunteering should be highly recommended due to the way it looks towards other people, to create personal connections with people, and to gain confidence. Through my personal experience I can positively say without a doubt that Washington Family Service Center is the best place to find and gain these benefits for your future.
