Texas Choir Comes to San Anselmo for Summer Mission Work

While San Anselmo and Fairfax students are headed , working on different educational projects, seeing other towns, and doing all kinds of activities this summer, a different group of students have come to San Anselmo to do some hand-on mission work right here in our streets.

Over three-dozen students from Plano, Texas (a suburb of Dallas) are building rooms at , pulling weeds along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and filling in mulch at – all as part of a summer service project.

“They’re great kids,” said San Anselmo Community Services Director Dave Donery.

The students, who are in the high school choir at Prestonwood Baptist Church, are part of 300 kids from the church working at different sites throughout the Bay Area. The group boarded nine planes and requires seven buses to get them to their various destinations this week, said Dawnette Lantz, one of the adult leaders of the San Anselmo group. Though all 300 of the students are staying in the Headlands hostel and the YMCA, different groups are working at different sites throughout the Bay Area.

But, the San Anselmo group thinks they got lucky: it’s been far sunnier here than where their compatriots are working in the city.

“This has been a bright spot,” said Lantz, “blue skies, warm temperatures.”

Luke Kiron agreed. San Francisco, he thought, was a little “dreary.”

It hasn’t always been dreary. The group did get caught in the middle of a riot earlier this week over the fatal police shooting of a man on a BART platform.

Another local perk: getting to go to In N’ Out without the three hour wait that comes at the one In N’ Out joint near their home in Texas.

Along with visiting Alcatraz and eating at Hard Rock Café, the group is performing a number of shows around the city, including one in Union Square and at the Golden Gate Park bandshell. They started practicing the show, which includes costumes and dancing, as early as June and this trip caps off the year.

Today, Thursday, at 10 a.m. the San Anselmo group will put on a mini-show for the kids at the town summer camps at near the Snack Shack.

That’s not the only thing they’ve been doing for the town.

Through connections with Red Hill Church, the group decided to send some of the students to do work around the church – hoping to build a long-term relationship between the two congregations. But, there just wasn’t enough work to be done at Red Hill Church.

So, the church contacted their good friends across the street at Isabel Cook, where the town houses the recreation department.

Seventeen of the Plano singers have weeded the front of Isabel Cook, fixed up some of the wood planter boxes, and filled in the area with new mulch. The new landscaping might not have been finished for a long time, with the town budget in dire straits, without the help of the kids on a mission. 

The effort has been much appreciated by residents stopping to thank the kids and talk.

“People driving by honk and say thank you,” said Angie Driskill, the other adult leader of the San Anselmo group.