How valuable are high school community service hours?

by desertjim

The transition website of President elect Obama includes a page titled “America Serves”. The site says that the Obama-Biden administration intends to set a goal that all middle school and high school students engage in 50 hours of community service a year.

Of course, community service for high school students is hardly a new idea. Many high schools started adding community service to their curriculums 15 years ago. Now, schools all across the nation require some number of service hours as a graduation requirement. Pacific Collegiate school in Santa Cruz, CA, requires 20 hours of community service a year for high school students and 10 hours a year at junior high. South Houston high school requires 25 hours a year (100 hours completed by graduation). The largest requirement I found was at Robert F. Kennedy high school in Queens, NY. Students (sophomore-senior) must accomplish 200 hours of community service before being allowed to graduate.

The push for more community service from high school students is coming even as cynics are calling existing programs a form of forced altruism. Not only are some college admissions officers rolling their eyes at bogus sounding claims of service, but high schools are scaling back the requirements, acknowledging that a lot of the so-called service is meaningless. Lauren Swierczal, who took over last year as director of community service at a private school in the Bronx said, “I was finding [a] fixation more on hours than acts of service.”

Not everyone is put off by the community service requirement. Angelica Body-Lawson, a junior at private Horace Mann in New York said her younger sister, a middle school student with no hourly requirements, recently volunteered for a project that made crafts for the children of battered women, and the work went late into the night. Amasheka Collins, a junior at Harlem’s Frederic Douglass Academy worked with Columbia University students on a self-sustaining greenhouse project. She enjoyed the challenge and working with the Columbia students as much as the act of construction. Frederick Douglass students are now coaching elementary students in the neighborhood in their own robotics league. (6)

What is a reasonable expectation for community service from high school students? Should the service be part of graduation requirements? Do such programs contribute to a citizenry that grows up to see value in voluntary contributions to the larger community?

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