A few areas in Star City got a little sprucing up Thursday afternoon thanks to a little help from a group of incoming freshmen at West Virginia University.
“We are a group of Mountaineers from WVU who are spending their afternoon doing some service,” Melissa Calabrese, with the WVU Center for Community Engagement, said. “This group of students are early move-in students — this is their first week here on campus and this is how they’re spending some of their time getting connected to the community.”
The freshmen split their forces between weeding and spreading rubber mulch around the Tugboat Depot playground at Edith B. Barill Riverfront Park, and helping paint some of the curbs around the town.
Calabrese said the university wants to help students get connected to the community and do some service. “We know that when folks do service they forge stronger bonds together, feel more connected, and they actually tend to stay in school and graduate and do well.”
Star City Public Works Director Phillip Davis said the partnership was just as beneficial for the town as it is for the student volunteers and they were more than happy to help the group find projects to work on.
“This is great for the city and for the community — just sprucing up the community to make it look nicer,” he said.
“For us, as a public works department, it allows us to do other work while they’re doing this stuff that we would’ve been doing originally, so it’s nice in that sense,” Davis said. “It gives us a little break from this kind of work so we can work on other things.”
For more information on the WVU Center for Community Engagement and its current projects and upcoming events, visit its website CommunityEngagement.wvu.edu or follow it on social media @WVUCCE.
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