National Honor Society

Helping puppies? Playing with kids? Seniors Rachael Bischof and Lauren Stevens have done both of these through the National Honor Society. 

NHS is a selective organization for high schoolers based on scholarship, leadership, service and character. NHS not only recognizes students for their service and grades, but it gives them a chance to help lead their community by example.

“I joined it mostly because I like being a part of a community,” secretary Rachael Bischof said. “They try and pinpoint values like service, honesty, leadership, and integrity, all the good stuff.”

Bischof says that NHS students choose a philanthropy like youth, medical or animals and every semester they spend a certain amount of hours helping specific organizations that correlate to their philanthropy.

“My favorite part is definitely volunteering for the animal philanthropy,” Bischof said. “I love working with the animals. You get to walk them and really interact [with them], which I think is really cool.”

In order to apply to NHS, students must have a certain grade point average, fill out an application, answer the short answer questions and mark any volunteer hours and leadership services they have done. This is all based on a point system to decide whether a student is accepted into NHS.

“The application is really long,” member Lauren Stevens said. “You don’t have to have [community service] hours, but it helps because it’s a lot of points. Once you’re in, you have to keep up the community service hours which can be hard, especially in the fall when it’s really busy and the semester isn’t as long.”

NHS’s purpose is to make students more aware of what is going on in the community that surrounds them. In addition, they strive to make students more involved in their local town.

“It’s just made me more conscious of the community around me,” Bischof said. “Getting to volunteer with different organizations and see what other people do in their time is a nice reminder of what everyone is trying to accomplish.”