Manitou Springs High School’s Key Club hosts an annual Valentine’s lunch where they invite the senior community of Manitou Springs to come eat lunch with students. The lunch has been an annual event for 17 years. This year the lunch took place on Thursday, Feb. 12.
The Valentine’s lunch tradition originally started down at the middle school, and then moved up to the high school after COVID-19. “Sierra Dunlap was the president of what they call the Builders Club, which was a junior Key Club kind of thing,” Mike Talbott, MSHS’s previous Key Club advisor said. “They weren’t able to continue through COVID-19, so she wanted to do it up here.”
Kiwanis member George Whitt helped to start the first lunch at the middle school. Whitt has been participating in the lunches as a community member since. “It’s kind of like my legacy,” he said. “I’m happy they’re doing it.”
The lunch, and the club as a whole, is run mostly by the students. For the lunch the students contacted nutrition services to get the meal ordered, scheduled a bus to transport the seniors and planned out pickup times and end times. They also had to create invites for the community and hand them out. “I think my favorite part of Key Club is just really getting to see the students take leadership over something,” Tiffany Selz, the current advisor of Key Club, said. “They do a lot of it themselves, I get to really see them grow and thrive.”
The main focus of the event is to connect students of MSHS with the senior community in town. “The senior citizens are a part of our community that are very very supportive of the high school and its activities,” Talbott said. “They look forward to talking to kids from the high school, and some of them went to high school here, so they like to come back and see how things have changed.”
Logan Kelley, a senior and the club’s president, says that this is his favorite Key Club event all year. “You’re able to sit down and have nice conversations with the older folks who have been here a long time, and you’re able to connect with them,” he said. “They talk to you about their time in high school, and what’s changed and whatnot. You can talk with them as well as with your friends. It’s a good time.”
Talbott believes that the event is important for both the students and the seniors. “So many of the students here are only a couple years away from being adults and being full fledged members of a community,” he said. “I think the Valentine’s luncheon is a way to accomplish a bunch of important things. It lets the seniors see what the high school is about, which helps with the support that they’re willing to give us in the future because they see that the students are really good kids.”
Selz shares Talbott’s belief about the importance of the lunch. “I like to see how the students interact with the seniors, because it’s not all of their comfort place, right?” she said. “You don’t always want to spend your lunch, not with your best friend, but they really do a good job of stepping up and making sure that they’re talking to everyone and including everyone, and making it a special event for the seniors.”
Whitt enjoys watching the students be willing to listen to the senior community. “It’s fun to see the kids talking with the elderly,” he said. “What these people say is golden, you want to listen to these people.”
