Student Council Gives Back

252

Student Council: LCHS

At the beginning of the year, the LCHS Student Council embraced one initiative: Give back. 

Senior Class President Samantha Skula and Student Council Head Sponsor Melissa Cross have a lot of experience in community service, and they are in it for the right reasons. 

“They are really off to a great start this year,” Lakes Activities Director Mark Ring said. “When they do these kinds of projects, they aren’t out for themselves. This group, and in particular, Ms. Cross and Samantha are really out to help others.”

In October, the student council banded together to make blankets for cancer patients. After seeing a friend and a family member undergo chemotherapy, Ms. Cross felt inspired to help. Then she saw her son’s school was doing a drive to make baskets for chemotherapy patients, so she brought the idea to her own students. 

“I approached our student council group, and they jumped on it. I mean, I was so impressed by how much they wanted to do. And no one batted an eye. Nobody said, ‘No thank you. And we ended up putting together twelve different blankets in two weeks,” Cross said.

Likewise, senior Samantha Skula is also no stranger to community service. 

“For student council, we really wanted to focus on giving back, so we’ve been doing a lot of service-oriented projects, so when Ms. Cross came to us with this, we thought it would be fun and something that could really help out the community,” Skula said. Because she is so humble, one might not necessarily know this about her. Skula is a member of five different clubs, each of which is geared toward community service in some capacity. As part of FCCLA, for example, she participated in partnering with Feed My Starving Children. She has made gift bags for custodians, helped out animal shelters as part of ‘PAWS for Change,’ and she sold trees alongside the Evergreen Club to offset the school’s carbon footprint.