High School Pupils Get a Taste of Volunteering--and Like It

The high school students armed themselves with paintbrushes and drove around Garden Grove on Saturday looking for graffiti to eliminate. Whenever they spotted vandalized walls, they stopped and put their brushes to work.

“You see graffiti all over the walls,” Sonia Hernandez, 16, a student at Santiago High School, said. “It’s not right for (taggers) to do it. I wanted to help the community look better.”

Hernandez joined more than 700 volunteers, mostly high school students, who participated in the first Orange County Serve-a-Thon, a one-day event to promote community service among youths and raise money for future youth projects.

Sponsored by Variable Annuity Life Insurance and guided by a student committee, the Serve-a-Thon featured a score of volunteer activities staged throughout the county, including graffiti removal, landscape renovation and beach cleanup.

About 15 high schools participated, and Hernandez and her Santiago High School friends spent their day cleaning up graffiti along several streets in Garden Grove.

“I really don’t like graffiti, I’m tired of looking at it,” said Jose Martinez, 16, from Santiago. “I hope we do this again so I could encourage more people to come. I would tell them that somebody has to do something. We have to make a difference, and if we don’t do it, who will?”

While this group painted over graffiti, several dozen other students cleaned up stretches of beach near the Huntington Beach Pier. Another group socialized with the elderly at the Pacific Haven Healthcare Center. Others cleaned classrooms at several high schools.

“It was a type of activity that brought just a wide range of students with different interests,” said Annette Watson, an English teacher at Santiago. “It was fun for me to watch everybody work together with a common goal.”

For many volunteers, the event was their first taste of community involvement. Aracely Perez, 18, said it would not be her last.

The Garden Grove High School student helped paint and clean the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled, also in Garden Grove.

“It’s neat to see that they got in here and just worked and worked,” said Joan MacDonald, an instructor at the center. “The house was really in bad shape. It really looks great. They did a lot of hard work.”

Except for a few adult supervisors, all the volunteers at the center were from clubs and organizations at Garden Grove High School.

Students “learn values of life, like to share what they can do for people,” said Jim Ha, 18, from Garden Grove High. “I think every student in high school, even junior high school, should do it. So many people are going into gangs. Something like this . . . can change their lives.”

Organizers said that while the project mainly targets high school students, others in the community, including corporations and adults, responded favorably to the idea.

The one-day event prefaces a host of other activities planned over the next several months. Volunteers who participated also raised funds by asking donors to contribute money for every hour they worked, like a walk-a-thon.

Funds from the event will be used for scholarships, a summer camp leadership program and for other service projects.