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JMCHS freshman students weed at the Wasatch Community Gardens during the school’s Day of Service.

SALT LAKE CITY — Judge Memorial Catholic High School students took a break from their classes on Oct. 16 to spend a day serving in the community. More than 700 students, 75 teachers and staff members as well as 35 parent volunteers participated in the Christ the King Service Day, an annual event that the school has been organizing for the past eight years. This year, they visited 35 nonprofit agencies, parishes, schools and hospitals, most of them in the downtown Salt Lake City area.

Students were assigned to locations by grade, said Monica Howa-Johnson, JMCHS’ director of campus ministry. Freshmen students went to non-profit organizations, while sophomores helped out in several parishes.

Over the course of their junior and senior years, JMCHS students are required to volunteer 40 hours at one location that serves marginalized populations in the community, so for Christ the King Service Day a number of them partnered with some of those organizations. In addition, some seniors helped out in Utah Catholic Schools classrooms.

Seniors who are peer ministers on campus took lead roles in the day of service, working with individual classes to prepare them for the assignments and teaching about the organizations where the other students would be volunteering.

On the service day, Howa-Johnson had 24 students in 24 different places, “helping to lead the charge, cheerlead everyone: ‘Let’s go,’” she said. “You know, pulling weeds for three hours for a freshman may not be their first choice of work to do, but my peer ministers were there to help: ‘Come on, let’s do this. We can do it.’”

It was a great experience, the peer ministers said.

“My experience with Christ the King Service Day was very positive,” Alex Varra said. “Being able to do service with a large group of my peers really made it feel like our school community was working hard to benefit the larger community, which I think is very valuable.”

Oliver Cockle enjoyed being able to get to know people and to help others within his community. “In years past, it has also been a great opportunity to find out what I enjoy doing and how I enjoy helping people,” he said.

“On Christ the King Service Day, it is much more meaningful and is much more fun if you aren’t just doing busy work and if it feels like you are making a difference or if you get to interact with the people you are actively helping,” Bella Haile said.

Among the places the students served were three that had benefited from the generosity of JMCHS founders John and Mary Judge – Holy Cross Hospital, the Cathedral of the Madeleine and the YWCA. The Judges, poor Irish immigrants who struck it rich in Utah’s mining industry in the early 1800s, went on to share their good fortune with the greater community in various ways, including establishing their namesake school.

“We like to see this as kind of giving back, in a way, to their legacy, and the fact that we were able to partner with three of the places that were so near and dear to their heart and so important to their legacy, we really felt just was such an amazing connection,” Howa-Johnson said. “We had worked with the cathedral before, but we had not yet partnered with the YWCA or Holy Cross Hospital, and just that we were able to reconnect with them and have our students go back and pay it forward we felt was a really, really wonderful opportunity.”