A community service state of mind

Wantagh High School students have a long history of giving back to their community. Whether it’s hosting a holiday toy drive, cleaning up a park or donating to a food pantry, local teens know how to make a difference.

Many of those students continue on with their community service efforts in college, including 2015 Wantagh High graduates Emily Fenter and Kayla Knight. Fenter was president of the Key Club while Knight was the 2014 Miss Wantagh.

“It becomes part of my schedule,” Fenter said about the community service she has done in less than a year at Binghamton University. “I feel like it’s a class for me to go to.”

In fact, during her first two semesters, it has been. Fenter lives on the Public Service and Learning floor in her on-campus community, which includes a class with regular guest speakers. Part of living on that floor requires 15 hours of community service each semester, and Fenter has been volunteering at the nearby Vestal Hills elementary school, helping a group of second-grade students with their academics.

She also has continued her work with the Key Club, but at the college level it is called Circle K. Both fall under the umbrella of the Kiwanis Club, the international service organization.

With Circle K, Fenter visited Kamp Kiwanis to help clean it up, and has attended service conferences in Lake George and Albany. She has participated in bake sales to raise money for Project Eliminate, which sends vaccines to mothers in Africa. In the fall, she took part in two breast cancer awareness walks in Binghamton, which she said were smaller than the Jones Beach walk but still make a big difference in the fight against the disease.

Fenter has also become involved in homeless outreach. She organized a service project with the United Presbyterian Church in Binghamton to serve a meal to the hungry. That night, she and her volunteers helped 120 people. They created a restaurant atmosphere in which the volunteers served the hungry, instead of making them wait on line for food.

“It was a really great experience,” she said. “Coming from Long Island, I didn’t see that much poverty first hand.”

The mission of the Miss Wantagh Court is to serve the community and Knight, as the leader of the 2014 group, spearheaded many efforts in Wantagh. She has taken that mentality to St. John’s University in Queens.

Knight said that on her second day after moving in, she donated blood at a campus blood drive, her first time ever giving. She is also involved with the St. Baldrick’s fundraiser at the school, in which people shave their heads in exchange for pledges to fight pediatric cancers. Although Knight herself didn’t shave her head, she has promoted the event at St. John’s.

One of her biggest missions has been her regular visits to help out at the St. Mary’s Church food pantry. Knight said she typically gets there around noon, helps sort food and prepare meals, then serves the homeless people who come in for dinner. “Just to be able to be there for someone, just to hand a cereal box to a toddler and have them smile, it’s so rewarding,” she said.

Knight said she took a class her first semester called Discover New York, which required six hours of community service in the city. She has far exceeded that.

She explained that a boy on her floor, Gabriel, who comes from California and is blind, was exempt from the community service but wanted to do it anyway. That further inspired Knight, already someone with a devotion to helping others. “I feel like that will stick with me forever,” she said. “He just wanted to go out and help people regardless.”

Knight also belongs to a theater group that does community outreach by performing for senior citizens around the holidays, including singing love songs for Valentine’s Day.

“That’s the thing that I love the most about St. Johns is people are so inviting and they do want to help others,” she said.

Knight credited her upbringing in Wantagh for her desire to give back, and noted the many positive adult role models in her life.

Fenter, who has been elected secretary of her Circle K chapter for next year, said she has been able to take her desire to help others to the next level. In Wantagh, much of her work was done within the community, but at Binghamton she said she has gotten involved with much broader initiatives.

“Community service was really big for me in high school,” she said. “It’s really been an eye-opening experience to get involved in different types of service here.”