Community Service…MLC Style

Ladies from the Metropolitan Learning Center

What do you think about when someone says “Community Service” to you?  Well, to me, I think of sitting in a room tutoring a younger kid for a couple of hours a week and fulfilling a certain requirement for school.  Nothing wrong with this.  I’ve participated in programs like the San Juan Tutorial Program as a kid and as a tutor that survived on the kindness of volunteers, both young and old.  I’m just saying this to point out that everytime I hear about a youth doing some community service it’s always for, what would be considered a white collar career…almost always an office type of environment.  Rarely have I seen youth gravitate to what is at the core of a good community…cleanliness.

That’s why it was with some joy that I came upon some young ladies shoveling, raking, sweeping along Main Street in the NorthEnd of Hartford on a sunny Saturday afternoon.  I pulled over to inquire further and found out that these young ladies were mostly sophomores from the Metropolitan Learning Center in Bloomfield.  All the ladies (even the 6th grader) had a community service requirement and they all chose to clean up their community.

I was equally impressed with what the young ladies told me about their school.  Whereas my very expensive education at Northwest Catholic required only community service at the sophomore year, students at MLC have a requirement every year…and the requirement goes up incrementally.  More power to them.

Kudos to them all!  I can imagine that it’s hard to sell a simple clean up project to the teachers and powers that be.  So I offer to those people this simple photo as proof that on the sunniest day of the year, seven young ladies chose to get in their scrubby jeans, grab some landscaping tools, and pick a small part of this 18 square mile city and make it the cleanest it can possibly be.

Thank you!!