Since autumn of 2018, Spanish teacher Pamela Dentler has been running a club known as Más Amor. Any student who wants to participate is allowed to do so, regardless of whether they are in a Spanish class. According to Dentler, there are around 40 to 50 participants at any given time.
“The students expressed an interest in having more opportunities to do community service,” Dentler said. “We had planned on starting up a chapter of the French and Spanish Language honoraries, and that required a certain amount of community service that was connected to culture, the love of language, the love of culture and the spreading of all of that, so we had to find a way to collect those kinds of hours.”
Más Amor organizes many service opportunities. For the 2023-2024 school year, they have participated in numerous projects, such as cleaning the Middlebranch Trail and Valley Chapel Cemetery, Adopt-A-Family and Adopt-A-Platoon, making signs for St Baldrick’s Day and Just Plain Dance and delivering Crumbl cookies to local food banks.
Sophomore Grace McKenna was recently elected as Más Amor secretary for the 2024-2025 school year.
“[Más Amor] is important to me because I really like helping in the community. I’ve done a lot of volunteer work in my past. I volunteer with dance here, and I volunteer at my dance studio, but I wanted to get out into the community a bit more. And I love Spanish and want to spread Spanish knowledge, so I really like it,” McKenna said.
Más Amor meets monthly after school. At meetings, upcoming events are discussed. Most meetings also feature some sort of activity, such as making signs to hang around the school to support other groups.
Another activity that Más Amor runs is Sobre Mesa. This event, which takes place in Dentler’s classroom during lunchtime, gives students an opportunity to refine their Spanish skills.
“I think that [Más Amor] is all-inclusive, and the students get a real feeling that they’re giving back to the community through the projects that we do… because it’s service,” Dentler said.
