Required Volunteering

Are Schools Overstepping Their Boundaries? Would schools be overstepping their boundaries by requiring community service hours? While parents and civic leaders feel that volunteering strengthens bonds between school and the community, high schools should not require community service hours for graduation because it will interfere with more important priorities that students have, students are busy and stressed enough with school and jobs, and schools should not interfere with students involvement in the community. First of all, students have priorities such as jobs and after school activities. 1 in 4 high school students have jobs, which interferes with most of their time.

One may observe what it has done to the shaken people of prison, for example. The men and ladies in that establishment have time to reflect and without free lives of their own. With this comes life lessons, and they can be learned through the work given to them during the time that they serve. I guarantee that this work such as picking up trash on the highway has made the majority of the imprisoned reflect on their past actions. Mandatory volunteering can have awful aspects too because people may not always enjoy it while some do.

Community service does not in any way help students it helps the person or thing receiving the service provide for free by our students. In the long run community service does not benefit the student. Also some may believe that forcing students to complete 75 hours of community service will give students a good experience. As a matter of fact, this in no way will be a good experience for students. They will be extremely stressed and anxious about graduating and about not being able to complete 75 hours of community service.

This idea of Mc Knight’s article appealed to me in so many ways. When I first began my service learning experience I often thought about the concept of service as something voluntarily but something required that I was expected to do. Signing up for my service learning site I knew that I was required to complete at least thirty hours of community service. I thought to myself and said “cool! I have to do community hours but it is okay it will be just like high school.

As I keep getting more established, I now realize that helping other people truly makes you feel better about yourself as it serves to develop a sense of empathy for others. Volunteering has impacted me since I realize that when I help other people out, it lights up their day, and they truly appreciate getting assistance from another person that thinks about them. There have been numerous impacts that

I have been a member of the United States Air Force for six years, and over the course of my enlistment, I have volunteered an average of two times per year. Volunteering is totally optional in the military, but required to stand out among your peers. Volunteering was a great way to develop my professionalism and personality. Recently I personally set up an event with the local community that not only involved cultural integration but strengthened myself as a leader. Dealing with different cultures and having a language barrier can be difficult sometimes.

Being in high school is time consuming. With some high schools adding community service as a requirement to graduate, it puts on more time for students. Yes, community service is good on college applications and it helps the environment and what not, but it should be optional. High school has enough requirements which includes certain classes that a student must take. Volunteering should not be mandatory because students already have enough responsibilities; they might have jobs, the need to be social and healthy, and if it’s supposed to be voluntary then it shouldn’t be forced.

During my years of community service, I have done multiple projects and activities through different clubs such as Key Club. In the years I was in this organization, I have done over 50 hours of service every year. I really enjoyed doing the homeless sleepout project that impacted the community by raising awareness of the homeless. I started Key Club my sophomore year of high school and fell in love with volunteering. I have done the homeless sleepout project two times.

Should Community Service be Required in Schools? Community service has been and still is, a very beneficial activity. It is beneficial to both the community itself and those doing it. It can assist students in discovering what they may want to do for the rest of their lives, and can help develop responsibility and time management in preparation for their future careers. There has been much debate about whether or not volunteer work should be required in schools, and from the year 1984 to 1999, a number of schools offering community service programs grew from seventeen to eighty-three percent (Millennials Rising, Neil Howe, and William Strauss).

Community service can be an important lesson students should learn before leaving high school. It can help teach them compassion, forcing them to see things from a different point of view than their own. To complete the service, you must volunteer, making them see what it's like to give, receiving nothing in return. This may upset some, but can help them accept the idea. If they're able to get comfortable with the idea still in high school, they have longer to accept

I completed 60 hours of observation/volunteering in the public-school system. 40 of the 60 hours were completed at Preston High School in Preston County. 20 of those hours were in a history classroom and the other 20 were in a special education classroom. The final 20 hours completed at a daycare/preschool where I now work called Play Works in Monongalia County. It was very interesting to go to each setting because they were all so different and had a lot of diversity.

Those who oppose a requirement of volunteering in high schools commonly seem to believe that the time required to volunteer is too demanding and that mandating the service takes away from the true nature of volunteerism. A major argument against mandated community service in high schools is the fact that it requires a number of hours; although, the average American watches over 28 hours of television a week, meaning they have time to spare throughout their high school career which could be used productively on a community service project (Herr, 2007), which is why it is more than feasible for students to complete mandated community service hours in high schools. The biggest argument against mandated volunteering is the fact that it is mandated, not chosen by the student to do on their own free will; although, mandating this service is one of the only ways to get students to become a part of the public and actively support the community which they were raised in (Anderson, 1999). Also, those who take part in helping out their community develop a greater commitment to their community, whether they chose to volunteer or not (Beehr, LeGro, Porter, Bowling, & Swader, 2010), meaning that students who were out doing some sort of community service developed a sense of caring for their work regardless of it being mandated or not which is why schools should mandate community service. Community service is beneficial almost any way that a spectator looks at it even though it demands a great deal of time and is required, students are benefitting themselves and their community

Social welfare agencies often employ volunteers in welfare and care services. The New Right, supporting welfare privatization, has been advocating for the integration of volunteers into the social care system since the 1980s. Community care was considered as the opposite of institutional care. Community care firstly appeared in a green paper from the UK titled “Community Care: Agenda for Action”, later known as The Griffiths Report. Community care became a policy goal in a white paper called “Caring for People: Community Care in the Next Decade and Beyond”.

Volunteering affects many things within a society, from the peoples’ feelings to the economy around them. The effects that volunteering cause vary between types of people. When deciding to volunteer a large amount of information is being taken into consideration and choices must be made. The reasoning on the choice of volunteering is also a process that varies between persons. Some people choose to volunteer because of emotional reasons and others volunteer just simply because they desire to help.

Generally, when students help out in the community they do it because they care. Currently, at Redondo Union High School, students are not required to maintain a specific number of volunteer hours to graduate. Every now and then administration discusses making volunteer hours a graduation requirement, and whether it would help or hinder the student population. Volunteering in our community should be required because it will allow RUHS students to gain a fresh outlook on life, but this requirement would only be beneficial to students if there was not an unrealistic standard. Most students at our highly praised school strive to be accepted by a four-year university.