Should community service be required?

PRO: Community service broadens students' horizons, triggers lifelong interests.

To survive the real world, a teenager should learn the basics during high school – how to juggle classes, how to distinguish between the gas and brake pedals and maybe even how to pour a bowl of cereal for dinner. All that is well and good, but students rarely learn how to be part of the community.

As a stronghold of integrity, honor and social responsibility, community service should be made a requirement for graduation.

Students can groan all they want, but volunteering 25 hours a year is no big sacrifice. According to the Washington State Department of Health, the average teenager spends 20 hours per week watching TV. According to Nielsen / NetRatings, he or she also squanders 26 hours a week online. To put the mandate into perspective, that’s 46 hours per week spent with the media when students could be banking hours toward a yearly commitment to the community.

It’s important for students to identify with something bigger than themselves, Students for Social Responsibility adviser Jim Antenore said. Community service helps them do just that. Getting involved builds self-discipline, pride and appreciation of life’s luxuries. Exposure to new people and places also broadens one’s world perspective. Volunteering can even trigger lifelong interests as he or she discovers strengths and passions.

Community service can also give students a leg up in the college rat race. During application season, admissions officers are on the lookout for well-rounded students who do more than study, counselor Connie Franks said. Colleges seek teens who are active participants in their communities because they’re likely to be the ones getting involved in the college scene. Some universities, such as the University of California Santa Cruz, even have classes with their own community service requirements. It makes sense, then, that those universities would seek the same initiative in their applicants.

Acting “in loco parentis,” or in the place of parents, teachers and staff members have a professional responsibility to teach students character, principal Monica Colunga said. Just as our school offers students the chance to be on a team athletically, it should also let students be team players in the more global aspect of community service. Volunteering helps students understand their role in society and their potential to contribute to it.

Ultimately, volunteering benefits the giver just as much as the receiver. Volunteering – be it cleaning the campus, working a booth or packaging donations – promotes social awareness, and social awareness is an essential part of growing up. Helping the community is more than just another extracurricular activity – it fosters both sense of self as well as sense of responsibility.

– Jenny Xie

CON: Requiring hours for graduation violates the charitable spirit of volunteer work.

Clearly, community service benefits society. However, “involuntary volunteer” work remains a paradox. Requiring students to serve the community for graduation would prove unethical and cloud the true meaning of volunteering.

Mandating community service violates the spirit of volunteer work. Volunteers should deeply care about a cause and altruistically choose to help the community. To require service would force students to help against their will – to involuntarily serve the community. One cannot claim to live in a free society when he or she is mandated to do things they do not necessarily believe in. Furthermore, why would organizations even want student volunteers who do not feel strongly about the cause? These students would work less vigilantly and possibly inefficiently. Such students may cause more harm to the community than good.

Although community serve can distinguish between similar college applicants, the advantage would be lessened if community service was made mandatory. Colleges would know that the student was merely fulfilling a requirement. In order to regain an advantage in college applications, students would need to work even more hours. In short, mandatory enforcement would inflate the college standard and thus not significantly help deserving students get into college. Counselor Linda Davis said that enforcing HIS values would have to be the core piece of why we implement mandatory community service, not boosting college applications.

It would also be unrealistic to impose further encroachments on students’ free time. In addition to homework and obligations such as after-school jobs or athletics, students may not have enough time to dedicate to serving the community. Some students might be unable to complete the hour requirement before graduation. Counselor Judy Confrey worries that some might resort to cheating to fulfill the requirement. This would completely undermine the spirit of what community service is.

Additionally, a mandatory community service program would take time and money to implement. In light of recent budget cuts, creating such a program is unrealistic. Administration would bee to hire and pay new staff members to oversee the program in a time when they are struggling to keep the ones they have. Nobody questions the significance of community service, but students should decide for themselves whether or not they want to help the community. Under the current system, students receiving recognition on their transcript if they complete 25 or more hours of community service in a year, but students do not need to fulfill a requirement to graduate. The existing system allows students to volunteer for their own reasons but also provides them the freedom to decide not to.

– Mike Normandia

Jenny Xie and Mike Normandia are students at Irvine High School. This set of articles was first published in the March 14 edition of Irvine High's student newspaper, El Vaquero.