Club provides volunteers with an opportunity to help younger students in the community

For National Honor Society’s new community service project, it looks as though slow and steady might end up winning this race. The project, based in the Santa Clara Housing Authority, near De Anza Blvd., focuses on helping local students with their homework after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays from around 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Although the project has had a rough start, the officers are hoping to resolve the issues by attracting more volunteers and eventually bringing the project to its full potential.

The established program was a great opportunity for NHS’s volunteers, but there were just not enough NHS students to help at the Housing Authority. According to Junior and Treasurer Ben Yang, one of the main difficulties is that the program only gives opportunities in a limited time frame. Because most students are busy with homework and other extra-curricular activities during the program hours, it has been hard to find volunteers to sign up and participate.

“The sign-ups are online but it’s not like an average activity where if you sign up and don’t go, you get deducted hours,” Yang said. “If you have another commitment and you can’t make it, we don’t deduct your hours because it’s on the weekday and it’s after school.”

Although the lack of volunteers hasn’t been too detrimental to the program, Yang thinks that it would be helpful if more NHS members participated so it wouldn’t just be the officers at the Housing Authority every week, because they do want this program to be a success.

The idea for this program was first introduced by senior and NHS Co-President Chelse Tsai-Simek, when she personally volunteered at the Housing Authority last year.

“They had one coordinator who would be there every day, Monday to Thursday, from 3 to 6 p.m.,” Tsai-Simek said.”He was just a De Anza student, but he would come and take care of the kids, but [the Housing Authority] ran out of funding, so they had to cancel the program.”

This year, Tsai-Simek tried to integrate this homework-helping program with NHS’s volunteer opportunities. With more volunteers helping out, funding wouldn’t be a problem and the program would be able to continue. She saw that this program gave the students living nearby something to do after school while their parents were at work. The kids could get more attention at the center because their parents’ work hours would run late and the kids would get out of school as early as 2 p.m, leaving them with nothing to do.

“[It is] not so much a day-care as an enriching experience,” Tsai-Simek said.

The center focuses on giving advice and educating the participating students on how to live their lives by encouraging them to “be good, do good and be well, live well,” as their basic motto dictates.

The NHS officers have a plan to help connect more volunteers to the program because it is so beneficial to the students who participate. Both the officer team and the project team and those delegated to work on this project specifically, are working together to try to make this program more successful.

They would like to open up the opportunity to four days a week to accommodate more members’ schedules and even try to work in some time on the weekends. They would also like to include the rest of the community, including the adults and elderly in the area, with some speakers who would talk about health, making good choices, and going to college.

If, as time goes on, the program becomes more successful, the officers would like to submit this project for the NHS Project Award, a national competition for all NHS chapters. But more than just the recognition, it’s the experience the officers want to give to their members.

“This is a long-term [project] where we want our volunteers to make that connection, have a relationship with those kids,” Tsai-Simek said, “because that’s what’s going to be what’s best for those kids and what’s best for our kids. It’s those lasting relationships where [the students] have a mentor to look up to or a friend they feel is there for them that makes this program different from any other.”