ANAHEIM : Girls Use Holiday to Aid Widow

Covered with paint from head to toe, 15-year-old Helen Berger stood among her classmates Wednesday and explained why they volunteered two days of their spring break to spruce up the house of a 77-year-old widow.

Sure, the 150-student, all-girl Catholic high school requires its students to perform 80 hours of community service before graduation. But there is more to it than that.

“It’s because we receive something by doing this--a sense of accomplishment,” said Helen, a sophomore at Cornelia Connelly School of the Holy Child Jesus.

For seven years, the college preparatory school has been requiring its students to perform community service as a part of their education. For three years running, the program has received the Disneyland Community Service award for accomplishment by an Anaheim youth group. Sister Elizabeth Muir, the program’s organizer, said it is important that students get a chance “to reach out and touch other people’s lives.”

“Through our community service program, a lot of our students have chosen careers where they will work with people,” Muir said. “We have had students who are now in college studying nursing or the medical fields because of this program.”

This most recent group of 33 participants began work on Nettie De Mattie’s house on Tuesday under the guidance of a local painter, Philip Hermann, and his son, Mike. By Wednesday morning the chipped and peeling paint had been almost completely replaced by a coat of beige. The city, through its Paint Your Heart Out Anaheim program, recommended De Mattie’s house to the school.

“I love it,” De Mattie said as she watched the girls embellish her home of 35 years. Her only income is from Social Security she and her disabled adult daughter receive.

“I hated the way it looked because I know everybody thought it was so ugly and I was so ashamed,” De Mattie said. “But I couldn’t afford to fix it up, I just couldn’t. I feel so lucky right now.”

Helping others who are less fortunate is what makes the work worthwhile, said Penny Minna, a 17-year-old senior from Huntington Beach. She remembered when she was a freshman and, because of the community service requirement, how she had volunteered at the food distribution center.

“The woman who was working with me pointed at a homeless man and she told me that somebody had stolen everything he owned and that all he had left was the clothes on his back,” Penny said. “Seeing things like that has had an effect on me.”

At some public schools, requiring high school students to perform community service has been under debate. It has generally been rejected because opponents feel service loses its meaning if it is not completely voluntary.

It is a debate that raged among administrators and teachers when Connelly began the program--one that continues among the students.

“I’m learning to be selfless and that people need our help, but I just don’t think community service should be a requirement to graduate,” said Natalie Taormina, a 16-year-old sophomore from Anaheim.

But Gina Certeza, a 17-year-old senior, wondered how many of her classmates would get their first exposure to community service without the school’s extra push.

“I would like to think we would still have a lot of people here, but we might not,” she said. “And its not like it’s 100 hours a semester--it’s eight or 12.”