Aurora Christian Schools find mission close to home
Students from Aurora Christian Schools are accustomed to traveling to Tennessee and other states to perform good deeds in a program the school calls "Mission Impossible." On Friday, that task became mission proximal as more than 800 students in all grades took to the Fox Valley for an entire day of community service.
The youngest students spent the day caring for their school and writing letters to cancer patients and soldiers. Older students ventured out into Aurora, Batavia and St. Charles to provide a helping hand at private homes, The Holmstad retirement community and the Northern Illinois Food Bank.
Parent volunteer Duane Oest said he's never seen students perform community service on this magnitude in the 35-year history of the school.
"This is the first year where the school is really concentrating on giving back to the community," Oest said. "It's pretty good to see some kids, instead of spray painting on walls, they're wiping down tables."
Oest supervised teams of students at The Holmstad in Batavia as they scraped old food from tables, disinfected dining halls and groomed the grounds by hand and elbow grease.
"We are extremely grateful," said Donna Leitner, a life enrichment assistant at The Holmstad. "We are a large campus with a lot of grounds to maintain. This really makes a difference."
Residents spent the day mixing words of gratitude with instruction about weeds to pull that they've always found annoying while looking out the window. Students always responded with a word of thanks for allowing them to help out. There was no complaining about the tasks to be done. Students just did it and found reasons to smile while working together.
"It puts life kind of in perspective when we go and take our time and help people," said Sarah Neiman, 14, an eighth-grader from Oswego. "Sometimes we don't realize how fortunate we are."
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