By Heidi Sampson
news@albertleatribune.com

ALDEN — Alden-Conger Public School will participate in its second annual Community Service Day on May 28.

“The event is designed to show appreciation for the local communities while teaching students to give back,” said Alden-Conger High School guidance counselor Amy Wallin.

Community Service Day was an idea of Principal Brian Shanks. He brought it with him from Truman Public Schools.

Last year, Alden-Conger’s sixth through 11th grades cleaned up area parks, such as White Woods and Arrowhead Point county parks. Students have even taken their jazz bands and choir groups into the local nursing homes to play for area residents, Wallin said. Some of the cities served by Alden-Conger Community Service Day are Alden, Conger, Freeborn and Albert Lea.

This year’s event, although still in its project planning stage, may include a range of possibilities such as the painting of curbs, cleaning county parks, music for nursing homes and planting trees.

“Every year students fill out a survey in which they choose what project they would like to do. They then number the projects in order of priority, and we try to place students with their first choice,” Wallin said. After the initially survey is complete, students are placed together by age and assigned their community service project.

An extra special addition to this year’s Community Service Day projects will be a general mural completed in memory of Ethan Braden, who would have been a senior this year at Alden-Conger.

Braden plummeted from a ledge at Fall Creek Reservoir in Lane County, Ore, on July 5, 2012. He hit his head on a rock and was found by divers 54 feet beneath the water’s surface. He was 17.