Maryland Has Broadest Requirement for Community Service by Students

When nearly 43,000 public high-school students in Maryland were awarded diplomas last year, they had racked up some three million hours of community service.

Maryland is the only state in the union that bars public high-school students from graduating unless they fulfill a service requirement. Students in the state must spend at least 75 hours volunteering, or working on projects that tie community service to their academic studies.

The 1997 graduating class was the first to be covered by the service requirement. Forty-nine students failed to graduate solely because they did not meet their requirement.

Educators and politicians hope the rules will encourage young people to become more interested in finding ways to help others, instead of just worrying about getting ahead themselves.

But it will take many years to determine whether Maryland’s mandatory service requirements make much of a difference in cultivating a lasting sense of civic responsibility.

While many states are watching to see whether Maryland’s policy works, no other state has gone so far as to adopt a comprehensive community-service requirement. However, many governors have a keen interest in promoting service as part of their efforts to improve education.

In 1989, as part of a major effort to overhaul education by the beginning of the new millennium, the nation’s governors issued a joint statement calling on “every school in America to prepare students for responsible citizenship through participation in community service.”

In California, which has more schoolchildren than any other state, the Department of Education initially wanted to find a way to make all six million students within its 1,000 public-school districts perform community service. Education officials wanted to use service to improve education and instill civic responsibility in students.

But the department came under intense pressure from local school districts to drop the idea of forcing all public school districts to implement community-service rules.

“It’s such a hot button,” says Wade Brynelson, an assistant superintendent for California’s Department of Education. “We didn’t want to get hung up on a fight about this.”

While a state like Maryland, with only 24 school districts, can adopt a statewide policy and have relatively few problems, Mr. Brynelson says, California is too large and diverse for a single community-service approach to work. Instead, the department will leave it up to local school boards to decide how to encourage volunteerism. “We can’t force people to do this stuff,” he says.

Still, the Department of Education has set a goal that by 2000, at least 250 of the state’s public-school districts will offer students opportunities to do community service. By 2004, the goal is to have 500 — or one-half — of the districts do so.

Currently, 51 of California’s districts require community-service work to graduate.

However, the 133 California districts that share $2.2-million in federal money under the National Community Service Trust Act will be required to offer community-service opportunities if they wish to continue receiving that financing, Mr. Brynelson says.

Nationwide, schools and colleges have received $43-million this year from the federal government’s Learn and Serve America program, which pays for efforts to integrate community-service projects into academic course work.

However, that money is now in jeopardy.

The Senate has voted to give the Corporation for National Service, which operates Learn and Serve, an additional $43-million for the program in fiscal 1999.

But the House of Representatives, which wants to abolish most of President Clinton’s AmeriCorps community-service program, voted to eliminate all of the Learn and Serve money. House and Senate negotiators are expected to work out a compromise within the next month or so.