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(Photo: Melissa Stewart/The Community Recorder)
COVINGTON – On a cool summer Wednesday morning, Collin Brungs and Max Keith are outside of John G. Carlisle Elementary School tossing water balloons onto a multicolored tarp.
Surrounding and holding tightly to the tarp is a group of elementary students. They giggle as they work with Brungs and Keith to balance the water balloon on the tarp, attempting to toss it from one side to the other without it hitting the ground.
Flop. Splash. This water balloon may have hit the ground, but the spirits of Brungs, Keith, and the students are high. They're spending time together, having fun and learning.
Brungs, 13, and Keith, 14, are incoming freshmen of Covington Catholic High School (CovCath). They've been spending the week at Carlisle Elementary volunteering through CovCath's new partnership with Covington Partners. Covington Partners is a nonprofit organization of the Covington Independent Public School District.
"It's been a lot of fun," Brungs said. "You get to interact with the kids and have a great time. You have fun with them and help them out when they need it."
Many CovCath students are volunteering with Covington Partners this summer as classroom and field trip assistants in their summer program. The program offers enrichment and fun activities, as well as field trips to Covington students.
"Summer learning programs like ours are important for two reasons," Covington Partners resource development coordinator Tom Haggard said. "One, our students get to keep practicing their reading and math skills over the summer. By staying in the habit of reading and practicing math facts, our students are able to stay on pace with their peers and not fall behind academically. Second, the summer is a fun and engaging time where students get to build positive relationships with teachers and school staff."
Young students are also building positive relationships with older students as well, he said. That has certainly been the case with the CovCath students.
"The students have been very helpful," Haggard said. "They've built relationships with our students and they've been great role models."
This partnership with Covington Partners is one way CovCath is fulfilling its mission through its community service program, CovCath director of business operations and marketing Jill Franxman said. Students donate about 19,000 hours of their time and talents in a given year.
"Our mission is to educate our young men spiritually, academically, physically and socially," Franxman said. "We hope to build leaders for our community and more importantly, teach them to become leaders who give back."
Franxman said the partnership with Covington Partners is a win-win for all those involved.
"We're helping our home community while providing our students with important leadership service where they can both be role models as well as learn some things themselves from the experience," she said.