Lower Merion Schools' MLK Day Of Service is Bittersweet

On Friday afternoon, the Lower Merion School District held its third annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Afternoon of Service at , a positive event and yet a sad one, as a seventh-grade student who died Friday morning was remembered.

Staffed by volunteers from the ranks of students, staff and teachers, the event provided the public with an opportunity to simply do good. There were service projects like sewing pillow cases for People's Emergency Center, making quilts for a local senior center and collecting food for needy area families. Visitors could make and write cards to American military members. Area students read stories to young children as others helped with a variety of arts and crafts. For entertainment, area students sang and recited poems and passages. 

Jennifer Milani of Penn Valley, who initiated the day of service three years ago, worked before, during and after the event to make it all work. She has worked tirelessly on it for the past three years. Hats off to Jennifer for making the word "service" have real meaning to people in Lower Merion and Narberth.

Two very ambitious service projects stood out. One was the effort to feed the needy. Narberth Community Food Bank, Bryn Mawr's Ada Mutch Resource Center Food Cupboard and Ardmore Food Pantry were there to collect food and foster contributions aimed at feeding the areas needy families. The Narberth group was promoting its Sponsor A Family program that is aimed at finding donors to make a continuing commitment to eliminate hunger throughout Lower Merion Township.

The other project was Lower Merion High School's Build On Chapter project.  The LMHS Chapter is one of 180 nationally. Its 18 students are committed to helping to build a school in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The students have to raise over $66,000 to travel to Haiti and work with community members to construct a two- to three-room schoolhouse. That is an undertaking of immense proportion for high school students but one that shows the level of commitment that teenagers can make.

The community event also observed a minute of silence in memory of Sean King, a seventh-grader at who died Friday morning. Sean had Down syndrome but attended mainstream classes. He suffered a stroke Tuesday morning, and one of the event projects was the making of a huge card to be delivered to him at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Classmates wrote on it Friday anyway, in his honor.