Key Club has been in the Tigard community for 50 years. However, when students walked through Club Rush this year, Key Club was nowhere to be seen. Instead, students saw a new club, Service Club, in its place. 

     Just like Key Club, Service Club is all about volunteering and community service. Before IB Psychology teacher Fredrick Holtz was the faculty advisor of Key Club, there was former Tigard High teacher Jay Leet.

     “Jay went to all the events and had all these connections in the community with the Good Neighbor Center and hanging Christmas lights for the old people and all the fun events,” Holtz said. “And so the club grew because Jay made himself available to do the events.”

     Club membership went up from 100 to 270 and from doing 15-20 events to 30 events. On top of all of that, the club had a combined 3,000 hours of service. 

     Every school Key Club is paired with a Kiwanis advisor. After six years of all three advisors (Holtz, Leet, and the Kiwanis advisor) working together to grow this club, the Kiwanis advisor retired. When a new Kiwanis advisor was hired, he noted that the club didn’t meet the necessary requirements of a Key Club, for example….. Leading to many disagreements between the two parties which ultimately ended in Leet to quit. The Key Club officers were not happy when they heard the news so they decided to try to come to a different solution. 

     Ultimately the decision to leave Kiwanis was up to the co-presidents senior Jessica Woolfolk and junior Rietta Thomson. With lots of discussion and debate, they decided that they wanted to leave that partnership and do their own thing.

     “I believe that Tigard Service Club is a student club, led by the students for the students. Kiwanis values were not aligned with that, and I believe that they did not have the best intentions for our advisor officers, or our members in mind when making decisions for the club,” Woolfolk said. 

     When asked for an interview for this article, Kiwanis member Robert Bell declined. However, through an email, Bell explained the Kiwanis position.

     “Despite our desire to reconcile those differences, we were unsuccessful. As a result, it appears that members of the Tigard High School Key Club with the support of the faculty adviser no longer desires to remain a Key Club and have formed a separate Service Club at Tigard High School,” Bell said.

     Since the separation from Kiwanis, Service Club has been doing that it was doing before. There was a fear that on their own Service Club could not provide the things that Kiwanis provided which was cords/medallions at graduation, $3,000 worth of scholarships, and insurance of students off campus. 

     “We figured we can get cords and medallions too. District can provide insurance so we didn’t need that,” Hotlz said. “The thing that left us wondering about was the $3,000 scholarships. So this year our mission is to see if we can raise it with Christmas light hanging by asking people if they want to donate to this fund. We are going to see if we can raise that scholarship money ourselves.”

     Now being their own club Service Club members and officers are excited for the future of this club because they get to really focus on helping the Tigard community a lot more.