Whitney McIntosh, Rockport High School

"If people ask me to volunteer and I have the time, I mean, why wouldn't you do it?" she said.

Community service organizer Nancy Paulson said of all the seniors at Rockport High, McIntosh was the first to come to mind when she thought of a student involved in volunteering beyond the norm.

McIntosh, 17, has clocked about 420 hours helping others during her four years of high school.

The amount of community service "kind of didn't even really hit me. . . . If people ask me to volunteer, I will," she said. "There's a bunch more stuff that I obviously didn't record [in the hours] that's just been around town."

When McIntosh was in sixth grade in 2002, the Congregational Church of Rockport started participating in Group Workcamps Foundation mission trips. Though she was a member of St. Joachim's Catholic Church, McIntosh also became a member of the Congregational Church in 2004 so she could go on the trips.

As part of the program, McIntosh traveled for a week in each of her four years of high school to New York, Pennsylvania, and two towns in West Virginia to help fix houses of disabled, impoverished, and elderly people. Most of the towns the organization visited were facing economic hardship, McIntosh said.

"You definitely get to see communities that you normally wouldn't, especially in a town like Rockport, which does have its affluent points where you're not quite always surrounded by poverty. So if you go in and someone's house is falling apart, it does hit you that, you know, you're in West Virginia and it's not always happy," she said.

McIntosh also brought the volunteer spirit to school sports. She played on the field hockey and tennis teams, and served as manager of both squads along with the boys' hockey team.

"The nice thing about Rockport is you can be involved in so many other things," said McIntosh.

McIntosh, who plans to major in business at the University of Connecticut in the fall, is also a member of DECA, a national extracurricular organization that supports development of marketing and management skills.

"If you're going to college for business or anything like that, that's sort of a good thing to have," said Scott Larson, adviser for Rockport's DECA club. "It's showing that you're doing something extracurricular, but also something extracurricular academic."

Larson said he can see McIntosh's community service roots shine through in DECA through her avid participation in fund-raising events for the group. As her teacher in several classes, he said he knows her grades are well above par as well.

"She's somebody who definitely believes in giving back to her community. That's very clear," Larson said. "Her community, her classmates, her school, definitely."