TJ students volunteer to help out senior citizens this holiday season.
Photo by Rebecca Holt
Some members of National Honor Society, along with a few other TJ students, are volunteering for the Senior Connection Project. These TJ student volunteers will each “adopt” a senior citizen with whom to do a variety of activities this school year. Spartan students will help the elderly with something they have trouble doing, invite them to some TJ events (free of charge), and also ask them to attend some classes as a guest. Finally, the students will interview them and write their full life story, which is the biggest activity of the project. This biography will be self-published and presented to each senior as a surprise gift.
Dixie Darling, Humanities Facilitator at TJ, along with Nicholas Dawkins, Eileen Adair, and Barb Lotze (director of Visiting Angels), are the sponsors of Senior Connection. Darling, who is a widely published freelance writer specializing in feature articles for newspapers and magazines, will teach the student volunteers interviewing skills and how to incorporate their interviews into interesting, well-written feature stories. She will also become the editor of all the biographies.
Darling has sponsored this project at two other high schools, and reported that both times it was overwhelmingly successful. “The senior citizens and high school students formed a very special bond and realized that both age groups deserved a great deal of admiration and respect,” Darling claims. “These senior citizens will create another population in our school culture. It’s definitely a win/win situation as our students and the senior citizens make huge positive differences in each others’ lives.”
Any TJ student who would like to participate in Senior Connection needs to contact Dixie Darling in Room 3 before Winter Break. There are many local senior citizens eagerly waiting to be “adopted.”
