The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Student finds fulfillment in service
Kaylie Malloy, a junior at Chardon High School, embraces her service-oriented upbringing through her participation in service clubs, her church and the community.
Kaylie is a member of of Interact, The Core Values, Christian Athletes, and Writing Club as well as a member of the National Honor Society.
She also is on the school tennis team where she was captain last season.
Kaylie describes Interact as a student-led group whose motto is “student above self.” The group involves a small number of students who do service projects for the school such as hosting the annual chili cook-off, conducting coat drives and other small activities.
In Core Values, which Kaylie describes as a student board, she along with other students look at the school’s core values and find ways to help other students embrace them through activities to promote the core values and help other students get involved. Kaylie particularly likes to focus her attention on the community aspect.
She meets with other students for 15 minutes every Wednesday morning for a Bible study session with Christian Athletes.
“We don’t read the Bible but we do presentations about our faith and how to keep that through high school,” she said.
She is co-president of the The Writing Club which also meets every Wednesday morning for about an hour.
“We do some creative writing prompts,” Kaylie said. “Right now we are actually working on a project where we are going to make a short story compilation.”
One of her biggest service accomplishment is the Student Wellness Activity Fair which she orchestrated for the student body to help students learn to cope with stress.
“At the beginning of the school year I saw that a lot of kids were starting to get stressed about school and that they were using negative ways to cope with that stress,” Kaylie said. “So I figured it would be great if we had a way where we could learn about positive ways to cope with stress because there is a lot of it.”
Kaylie started organizing the fair back in October with assistance from one of the teachers at the school who she credits with being a tremendous help. She spent most of her Christmas break calling organizations and businesses about participating in the event.
According to Kaylie there were approximately 17 businesses and organizations that participated in the fair which was held at the high School on Feb. 23. An estimated 60 students attended.
She choose the event date to coincide with the third quarter of the school year, which she believes tends to be the time of year when everyone’s grades drop and general spirit around the school slows downs.
“It is in the winter and that’s when everything tends to slow down and I just wanted to make a positive turn off of that.” Kaylie said.
The businesses that exhibited at the fair showed students positive ways to deal with stress, such as doing yoga, using essential oil, and creating art projects such as painting rocks or Zentangle to help students cope with stress in a positive way.
Students also learned a technique called “tapping” that involves repetitively tapping different pressure points in the body to help reduce stress.
Kaylie said she definitely plans on doing this again next year.
“The students have responded really well to it and, like I said, third quarter is always a hard time especially around February in Chardon so we definitely plan on doing something next year,” Kaylie said.
Outside of School Kaylie stays busy with service projects through her church, St. Mary’s.