ARLINGTON, Texas – As the sun rose over the horizon, students from local Arlington College and Career High School gathered in the parking lot of Veteran’s Park, located in the heart of Arlington, to help enrich the natural beauty of the park and to gain community service hours participating in the “Keep Arlington Beautiful” campaign.
The students gathered around in-ground planter boxes, with trays of pansies and bags of mulch, ready to dig in the dirt and serve their community in a way that is fun and beneficial to everyone. They came prepared with their own gloves, water bottles and smiles from ear to ear, excited to get to work.
Brittany Dowell, student support interventionist at ACCHS and liaison for the school’s Key Club chapter, was present to supervise the students’ work and explained a little bit about the student organization present.
“So, Arlington College and Career High School is where they’re coming from, [and] they are Key Club members, which is part of Kiwanis,” she said. “And Kiwanis is an international organization that is built on student community service, and Key Club is the high school branch of that.”
Dowell explained that all of the students involved in this organization join knowing that they will be obligated to donate not only in the form of money but also in the most important currency, time. She made clear that the students are wholly committed once they join the organization because of the myriad ways that the organization can benefit the students in the long run.
“We have one senior each year who will receive a $1,000 scholarship,” Dowell said. “Kiwanis frequently donates money to us for different projects. So yeah, they have to pay their dues, but it always comes back, and it makes a difference. I make sure they know that going into it.”
The organization’s work happened to align Saturday with the work that the Arlington Parks and Recreation Department is doing with “Keep Arlington Beautiful.” The campaign is the Arlington branch of the national “Keep America Beautiful” initiative, which strives to get local communities involved in the maintaining and beautification of their parks, roadways, and river and creek systems.
The program at the national level not only strives to do the service work within communities with a localized volunteer base but also to conduct educational outreach programs on littering, the benefits of recycling and many more.
Even on a weekend morning, the students were energetic and ready to do their part.
When asked what brought them out so early on a cold Saturday, one student responded with just a single word: “Fun.”
Not taking his eyes off his work for one second, the student went on to explain that the group had enjoyed a great breakfast and was so excited to go and do “manual labor for the next four hours,” adding, “What could be better on a Saturday morning?”
The student looked up briefly and broke into a broad smile.
“You see me? This is the smile of a man who likes doing this stuff,” the student said.
Another student explained that the project was personal and went well beyond earning required community service hours for the Key Club program.
“I always like coming to Veteran’s Park. During COVID my family and I were always riding here on bikes, and it’s just nice for the community, right?” the student said. “It’s just a really nice park, and planting flowers and stuff just felt like fun. It’s hard work, but it’s nice and fun, and it just makes the park I like so much better.”
This story was produced as part of a service-learning project between journalism students at the University of Texas at Arlington and the Arlington Parks & Recreation Department.
