"Love Holton" draws volunteers for school maintenance work

On Saturday morning, June 20, more than 100 Holton community volunteers came together to do maintenance work at Holton’s elementary and high schools — landscaping, patching and painting walls, sealing football bleachers at the district’s football stadium, sheetrock repair and more.

The volunteer work day — called “Love Holton” by event organizers Carly Fletcher and Amy Cyphers and similar to a volunteer work day put on by Topeka churches as an outreach to schools in that city — covered “a ton of ground,” as Holton USD 336 Superintendent Trevor Ashcraft noted in a press release following the event.

As Fletcher noted, the real strength of Love Holton stems not from her and Cyphers’ work in putting the event together, but from the volunteers who came out on Saturday morning to put in the actual work.

“This was all about the discipleships of Jesus — being His hands and feet by serving others,” Fletcher said.

Every year, a group of Topeka churches get together for an event called “Sharefest,” described by its organizers as “an event that was created with the belief that churches and organizations can do more together than any one group could do separately to reach out to its community” and focusing on maintenance projects at school and other buildings throughout Topeka.

One of that event’s participating churches is Fellowship Bible Church, where Fletcher and Cyphers and their families attend church. Fletcher said they asked FBC leadership for their blessing and help in planning a similar event in Holton, since more than 200 people from Jackson County attend that church regularly.

“We knew we had a large volunteer pool ready and eager to be the hands and feet of Jesus,” Fletcher said. “We just needed to provide them with the opportunity. The church provided all registration material to get the ball rolling, and the rest is history.”

Fletcher said she and Cyphers met with Ashcraft and Holton district maintenance director Sam Tanking to get their “wish lists” on possible summer projects. According to Fletcher, Tanking “didn’t want to burden us with too many projects,” but the women encouraged him to come up with more potential projects.

“He had to find our crews more jobs the day of the event, because they worked so hard and so quick that we ran through the list pretty darn quick,” she said. “Our volunteers were amazing. They came to work!”

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