During Sedona Red Rock Middle School’s end-of-year field trip to the Humane Society of Sedona on Wednesday, May 7, the students were the ones bringing gifts to the animals — delivering two boxes of blankets and food collected as part of a donation drive across all three middle school grade levels.

“The high school Interact Club [gets] to do a lot of volunteering, and what we get to do is a lot of fundraising. This is our big volunteer act of the year,” said Club President Kasin Burke, an eighth-grader.

Interact is a youth club sponsored by the Rotary Club of Sedona that provides guidance, service opportunities and leadership development to students. The club is advised by middle school teacher Isabel Fritzler, who receives a stipend for the job, and succeeded Claire Amistoso this school year.

“Doing Interact for this age group is important because they’re growing and becoming more aware of the different career possibilities and what they might want to do when they grow up,” Fritzler said of the club, which was started in 2022. “It’s important to create opportunities for them to explore their ideas and participate in activities that help them pursue what they feel called to do. I know it might seem young, but if you read the stories of great people, it’s often at this age that they start thinking seriously about their future.”

“We launched a donation drive for pet items because we knew from previous years that [HSS] needs blankets, towels and similar supplies,” Burke said. “It was a competition. The winning grade got donuts. Each grade donated blankets and other items, and everything we collected was sorted by grade level.”

The eighth grade collected the most donations, and Interact used the same drive format earlier this school year to deliver over 150 items to the Sedona Community Food Bank, according to Burke.

“The donated blankets are fantastic because they’re useful all the time for us,” HSS animal care supervisor Trevor Combs said. “When we’re making our dog kennels in the morning … we’ll put down a sheet, and we try to put a large blanket down so the dog has something cushy to sleep on. But unfortunately, a lot of the time our dogs end up tearing them apart or soiling them to the point where we can’t reuse them.”

Combs said a blanket will last for about two to four months of regular use at HSS.

In addition to dropping off their donations, the students did chores at the shelter that included sealing bags of dog food, folding laundry and organizing supplies.

“I’m just always amazed by how much these kids do throughout the year,” Co-Chairwoman of Youth Services Jean Barton said. “But in my mind the single biggest deal is how the club president also has to run their meetings … And I learned how hard it is for a sixth-, eighth-grader to organize his own classmates.”

“Stay strong,” Burke said would be his advice to his successor. “The president actually runs the meetings, and they get a lot of backlash for that, because they don’t get a lot accomplished in some meetings, and they get a lot accomplished in some other meetings. So that’s the part I kind of struggled with at first.”

Club treasurer and art director Aarav Bhakta, a 13-year-old seventh-grader, is a presidential nominee to be Burke’s successor.

“We have Scorpion Nights at our school, and we design posters, help out with the overall design of like our table,” Bhakta said of his role as the club’s art director. “My goals would be to do more in the sense of doing more community service. [We] can probably go around, do more extracurriculars around school, do more fundraisers, so it’d act as like a student council, but for the community and the school. So our student council would do dances, we would do stuff like fundraisers … and raise money, and then plan a party or something and outside of school, we could use the extra money to donate stuff to like the Humane Society, and other like food banks.”

“I’m proud to see how far the club’s come,” Burke said. “In the beginning, it was only a couple people, and they weren’t really committed … The first year [started] with high hopes, we donated a lot that year, and then the next year was super-duper successful, and it’s just kept on growing.”

Interact Club Members:
Ashley Aleman
Natalie Avilez
Zoe Bermude
Kasin Burke
Matthew Brown
Atlas Branch
Aarav Bhakta
Alex Cutler
Abril Dominguez
Matthew Martinez
Luke Metzger
Neftail Montes
Anaiya Michelle
Yaretzi Perez Perez
Erick Perez
Francisco Sanchez

Club Advisor: Isabel Fritzler
Co-Chairwoman of Youth Services: Jean Barton