A Lesson in Mandatory Service

Requiring students to volunteer proves to be a mixed blessing

As the new school year opens, more students than ever before face requirements to do charity work along with their homework.

A spate of new mandatory community-service programs adopted by schools could be a boon to many charities seeking extra volunteer manpower.

But those programs could also cause problems for organizations that have not traditionally had young volunteers. Charities of all kinds are coming under increasing pressure to develop or expand volunteer opportunities that will appeal to young people — and that will inspire them to be involved in charity work the rest of their lives.

Among the cities where community service has recently been made a graduation requirement:

* In Chicago, this year’s high-school sophomores and subsequent classes face a rule that they must serve at least 40 hours before they can graduate.

* Philadelphia’s school board voted in June to require all 213,000 public-school students — from kindergarten through twelfth grade — to perform community service. Starting in 2002, students will not be able to graduate from the fourth, eighth, or twelfth grade without having completed a community-service project.

* Louisville, Ky., schools last spring approved a requirement that all high-school students complete 30 hours of service in order to graduate.

“We believe the community is an extension of our classroom,” says Joe Liedtke, a Louisville school-district official. “Even more important is the responsibility to our community. Our superintendent and our board felt we needed to move in that direction.”

Even in cities where students are not required to meet community-service requirements to graduate, they are encouraged to volunteer. Twenty-one of the 50 biggest districts now allow students to earn academic credit for projects involving volunteerism, according to a Chronicle survey.

Elsewhere, cities are debating whether to impose new requirements. Among the large metropolitan areas considering the idea: Fresno, Cal.; Los Angeles; and Mobile, Ala.

The requirements are not limited to public schools. More than half of 577 schools surveyed by the National Association of Independent Schools require students to do community-service work.

Nowhere are the requirements as widespread as in Maryland. Last year, the state’s public high schools graduated the first set of students who were required to follow the nation’s only statewide community-service requirement.

The Maryland Board of Education adopted the requirement in 1992. Board members said they they were worried that too many youngsters lacked a sense of civic responsibility. With five of the nation’s 50 biggest districts located in Maryland, the implementation of the requirement is being closely watched by non-profit leaders.

Many charity officials hope the proliferation of requirements will introduce a new generation to volunteerism and charity work. But other charity workers are less sanguine about the rules — especially, they say, because they have witnessed serious failures by schools that operate service programs.

In many cases, non-profit leaders say, schools lack the money and staff members to run effective programs, and end up expecting charities and students to make the community-service projects worthwhile.

Too often, they note, the lack of guidance from the schools means that student volunteers become burdens rather than helpful resources to charities.

Some fear that bad volunteer experiences could turn off young people permanently.

“When these things are not planned out well, we may dissuade young people from volunteering as much as we encourage them,” says Gordon Raley, executive director of the National Assembly of National Voluntary Health & Social Welfare Organizations.

Concern that service programs may not be meeting their full potential has prompted the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to devote $13.5-million, beginning in the next three to six months, to new efforts to examine and improve community service in schools.

“You can’t just pass a mandate and expect instant results,” says Chris Kwak, a Kellogg program officer. “It takes a commitment over time with both human and financial resources.”

Community-service requirements are not new. In 1975, Detroit’s school board voted to require that high-school students must either volunteer or hold an after-school job, and the Atlanta Public Schools have required 75 hours of community service for all high-school students since 1984.

But the movement for mandatory community service has gained momentum in the ‘90s, in part because of prodding from the Clinton Administration, which created the AmeriCorps national-service program and persuaded Congress to pour $215-million over the past five years into state efforts to tie volunteerism to education.

Also clearing the way for more school districts to back the volunteerism rules: The Supreme Court last year, for the third time, declined to hear legal challenges by students and their parents who argued that the rules were unconstitutional because they amounted to “involuntary servitude” and violated their rights.

While some schools continue to encounter complaints about the rules, the protests have been less vigorous since the Justices refused to review lower courts’ rulings that the requirements pass legal muster.

Community-service rules vary significantly from district to district, but many give students a great deal of flexibility in deciding how to meet the requirements.

Most allow any volunteering at a charity to count, but many also permit other forms of community activity, such as writing letters to soldiers in Bosnia, serving as lifeguards, and working on political campaigns. Some schools give kids a list of charities where they can put in volunteer hours, while others require students to carry out service projects tied to classes like biology, civics, or history.

Many charities have found ways to accommodate school-age youngsters and have been pleased with the results. They say students bring skills — especially in using computer technology — that adults do not necessarily have.

Jean O’Neill, head of the Red Cross’s National Office of Volunteers, says teen-agers are especially good at informing their peers about sensitive topics, like AIDS prevention. “They are an untapped potential at that age,” she says.

Ms. O’Neill says the American Red Cross saw a 20-per-cent increase last year in the number of young people who asked for certification forms to show their schools or colleges that they had volunteered at the charity. A total of 4,383 students asked for certification during the 1997 academic year, compared with 3,584 the year before — the earliest statistics available.

For charities that operate on a shoestring, student volunteers — regardless of their skills — are much needed to supplement the work of an overburdened staff.

“We’ve had more assistance from high-school students than ever before because of mandatory community service,” says Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, a group that fights pollution in California’s Santa Monica Bay. “It’s been a lifesaver for us.”

In Maryland, at the Anacostia Watershed Society, students pitch in to clean up the Anacostia River and to stencil hundreds of “Don’t Dump” signs on storm drains that empty into the river. Josh Ungar, the charity’s program manager and one of only four full-time employees, says, “We need as many hands, literally, as we can get.”

Mr. Ungar, 23, is himself a product of a mandatory community-service requirement — and a case in point of how it can lead to a philanthropic career. He applied for a job at the Watershed Society after volunteering for the charity as part of a requirement for an ecology class at the University of Maryland.

“It really got me interested in environmental education,” he says. “If I hadn’t been forced to volunteer, I wouldn’t have this job.”

Not all charities have found the influx of young volunteers to be so beneficial. Student volunteers often don’t realize what kind of work charities do and have unreasonable expectations going into their posts, sometimes expecting simply to have fun.

Staff members at Days End Farm Horse Rescue, in Lisbon, Md., say the state’s community-service requirements have made working with volunteers more of an ordeal than it used to be. They say young people who come to the horse farm often expect to ride all summer, not to muck stalls, clean saddles, or do other chores to help care for the dozens of abused and neglected horses that the farm adopts.

“Many are doing it because they have to fulfill their requirement,” says Kathleen Schwartz, founder of the charity, which has had 93 student volunteers this year. “It’s not something they’re really interested in or passionate about.”

Ms. Schwartz says she wishes that Maryland schools would provide students with more direction before sending them out to do charity work. “They need help to find out what it is they really want to do,” she says.

Other charity officials have heard students complain about a lack of guidance, and how that ruined their volunteer experience.

“I get pretty nervous when I think of mandatory service,” says Karen Young, who founded Youth on Board, in Boston, to encourage young people to serve on charity boards. “I hear from a lot of people who have had horrible experiences.”

One young man who put in volunteer hours at a homeless shelter told Ms. Young that all he did was sit near people who “didn’t smell very good,” she recalls. He complained to her that homelessness and the shelter’s work were never explained to him or put in context.

“When community service is not done well,” Ms. Young says, “it can actually leave people feeling very crummy and resentful.”

One reason that community-service programs are not as successful as they could be is that charities are rarely asked to offer their advice when service requirements are being drafted.

That is because most school-board leaders don’t think of community service as a direct effort to help charities. Instead, the rules are often motivated by educators’ desire to teach youngsters about their responsibility to help others and to provide kids with new job skills.

What’s more, non-profit leaders say too little thought goes into what it takes to make schools’ community-service programs succeed.

“Building an infrastructure to implement community service is critical work — unfortunately, it’s sometimes given consideration last,” says David Milner, founder of Funds for the Community’s Future, a Washington, D.C., charity that works to improve low-income urban neighborhoods. “Then it gets dumped onto schools and into communities: ‘Here’s this great idea we thought of,’ ” he says. “Well, this really doesn’t help us.”

In the District of Columbia, the school board voted in 1992 to require all high-school students to serve at least 100 hours before they graduate. Because of a lack of money, however, teachers and guidance counselors — who already have full-time responsibilities — were tapped to oversee the service program. Students ended up with almost no assistance in finding charity work.

Over the past two years, Funds for the Community’s Future has received about $100,000 from the Corporation for National Service, a federal agency that oversees volunteer programs, to try to improve the situation in Washington. The charity, which expects to receive an additional $99,000 from the corporation this year, has trained an AmeriCorps member to serve in each public school, counsel students on the significance of community service, and link them to charities.

However, even with the additional help, problems linger. James Greggs, founder of the Sign of the Times Cultural Workshop Gallery, a Washington arts group, says his teen-age volunteers talk about classmates whose teachers have allowed them to fulfill community-service requirements by studying in the library or joining sports-cheerleading teams.

“The pressure is on everybody to graduate the students,” he says, noting that schools already face low graduation rates. “It’s really hurting the whole program.”

In Chicago, as the first year of mandatory service takes effect, the school district is trying to stave off problems by training 10 teachers to be “community coaches.” The New York charity Do Something will give the coaches 24 hours of training, and provide them with a year’s worth of exercises on how to carry out community service. In addition, Do Something helped arrange for Fox Television to broadcast a campaign on service in Chicago, spotlighting local kids’ accomplishments.

Michael Sanchez, Do Something’s president, hopes that the Chicago program will become a model for other school districts, because right now, he says, mandatory community service is “not working in any district at any scale.”

Other school districts are counting on private donors to chip in and help pay the costs of training teachers and non-profit workers to weave community-service lessons into academic studies.

Kenny Holdsman, director of service learning in Philadelphia’s school system, says as much as $7-million must be raised over the next four years to cover costs beyond what the school district can pay.

Numerous charity leaders are eager to find ways to make the school requirements more effective, in large part because they believe doing so will turn today’s young community-service workers into tomorrow’s dedicated adult volunteers.

Already, they say, there is evidence that volunteering at a young age can make a big difference. According to the most recent study of volunteering by Independent Sector, 65 per cent of people who said they had volunteered in their youth said they still did so as adults. In contrast, among adults who said they did not volunteer when they were youngsters, only 31 per cent said they gave time to charitable causes.

While many charity leaders agree about the importance of recruiting young people to volunteer, it is unlikely that the debate over the wisdom of requiring community service will end anytime soon.

Ebony Martin, an Atlanta high-school senior, says she is glad she was required to volunteer. She loves her work at the Ansley Pavilion Nursing Home, where she regularly visits with a 113-year-old woman. But she readily concedes that many of her classmates put off fulfilling their service requirements until the last possible minute. ”I don’t think they like it,” she says, “because they have to do it.”

Mr. Raley, of the National Assembly, says he worries when he hears about such cynicism among young people.

“Maybe we should rethink making it mandatory,” he says. “Given everything we know about teen-agers, we should probably forbid them to volunteer and they would be out there in droves.”