Students from Mehlville and Oakville high schools put their minds and muscles to work during the week of April 29 to May 3 as the district organized a series of community-service projects to benefit area nonprofits and senior citizen centers.

More than 1,000 students participated in the Service Learning activities every day, which added up to more than 12,000 hours of donated work in the community, according to a district news release.

The projects ranged from preparing food for St. Patrick Center and the New Life Evangelist Center, clearing brush at Bee Tree Park, organizing supplies and donations at Nurses for Newborns, mulching the grounds at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, painting and cleaning at the Lemay Child And Family Center and helping get the new Team Activities for Special Kids, or TASK, complex ready to open. Band and choir members also performed at half a dozen senior citizen centers in the area.

The week of service projects is part of the Mehlville District’s continued commitment to being a valuable contributor to the community, and to teaching the value of volunteerism to District students.

Ryan Kulage, TASK program coordinator, stated in the release, “It’s so amazing having 30 kids coming in at a time and be enthusiastic about helping us out.”

After students cleared 10 truckloads of brush from Bee Tree Park, Larry Inabnit of the county Parks and Recreation Department stated, “It’s a great help. We would never be able to do this. It would take forever. It’s a big help because we are very short on manpower.”

Mehlville Superintendent Eric Knost stressed that service learning projects are nothing new to the district.

“Helping others has always been a part of the Mehlville School District mission,” Knost stated in the release. “We teach our students to not only excel in the classroom, but also to take that success into the community and make it a better place. I’m extremely proud, but not surprised at all by the quantity and quality of their efforts during the service learning week.”