The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

Pitch Opinion: SSL Hours

That little number reflecting student service learning hours earned on the top right corner of quarterly report cards has one of three reactions from a student. One, the student cringes and starts to think about how he or she can get those few extra hours needed to meet the requirement. Two, the student smirks at the ridiculously high number he or she has acquired from hundreds of hours spent at a summer camp, research lab, senior citizen home, etc. Or three, the student has just enough hours to graduate and may be perfectly content.

Ever experienced one of those reactions to your hours of student service learning?
We all have been bombarded with reminders about community service opportunities since the sixth grade, opportunities to help out school clubs, opportunities to volunteer at the local soup kitchen, opportunities to work at a summer camp and overall opportunities to help out the community and those in need. Take this time to reflect upon the hours you’ve acquired over the years; have those hours changed your life? Or allowed you to gain perspective on the world? Or even to truly help a fellow peer or citizen?

If an answer to those questions is yes, congratulations! You have accomplished an extremely rare feat and are one step closer to self-actualization. If the answer was no, then don’t fear because it is an all too common phenomenon where students merely get hours for the pure purpose of fulfilling the requirement and altruistic service is cast to the wayside.

Montgomery County has done a fantastic job compelling students to get out into the community with increasing the number of hours required for graduation and only allowing non-profit organizations to provide such hours. But it hasn’t been enough since many students remain unmotivated by the idea of helping people. We can take the program one step further to ensure truly valuable service learning.

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There are remedies to the situation. A junior, Denali Rao, suggested that a way to ensure this would be to require students to have hours from three different places that have to do in three different realms of community service like education, arts or recreation. This would create more eclectic and diverse community service experiences, along with indirectly prompting students to actively search for new ways to volunteer.

The community service graduation requirement of having 75 hours, which was raised in recent years from 60, was set in place for great reasons and has truly helped the surrounding community. But in these times of heavy competition for amazing transcripts and astounding test scores, community service hours are nothing but a mere requirement or a boost in college admissions in the eyes of some students. To create more awareness and advocacy for the pressing issues in the community, and even the world, a few tweaks to the student service learning program have become a necessity so that students don’t merely complete the hours but recognize the merit and values behind selfless community service.

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