Brentwood students help build house

For Brentwood High School senior Rebecca Dennis, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity to build a home for a Brentwood mother of two is personal.

Dennis, 17, understands the challenges of home ownership in her community. She said it's the reason she and about 20 Brentwood students gathered in North Bellport Thursday to help build a home for Monique Summers, a single mother who has struggled for more than a decade to buy a house.

"We could all be in the same situation," Dennis said. "She lived in my community . . . She's worked really hard to get this house, and I know that's what it's going to take to get my own one day."

Working with Habitat for Humanity of Suffolk County, the students, through the school's Interact Club, a youth service club sponsored by individual Rotary clubs, sold raffle tickets to raise $4,000 for the project and put up the first walls of the home Thursday.

Of the 35 schools that collected money to help build Summers' home, Brentwood High was among the top fundraisers, said Kathy Schaefer, Habitat's director of volunteer services.

"I think it's really important for students to realize how hard it is to live on Long Island," Schaefer said. "We're making dreams come true for families who would never have had any hope of buying a home."

A single mother who routinely works two jobs, Summers, 42, agrees. She and her children, Alisha, 18, and Haniif, 5, have moved seven times in 10 years.

"This is hope," she said as she watched students hammering nails into her future home. "I'm thankful that people want to volunteer their time."

Summers, who works as an account representative and customer service agent, applied for a Habitat home several times before being chosen. She is scheduled to move into the house in six months.

To her, the day was about seeing her dreams come true and about teaching the next generation the challenges of home ownership on Long Island.

"It's like building a wall to a new life," Lesly Alavarez, 17, a Brentwood senior, said shortly before the group put up the first wall.

Meanwhile, Alisha Summers, who graduated from Brentwood last year, said she was pleased to get help from a familiar place.

"It's just amazing that people from my community can do something so amazing."