Community Service and Student Volunteerism

Reasonably, community service positively impacts an individual and the community in which he or she resides, as well as neighboring residents, but Wheatland Union High School should not make it a requirement for graduation, as it takes away the merit of the act, is unfair to students who have outside obligations, and can be an insult to those who take pride in their volunteerism.

Source 4, In the Good Nameof Community Service, reports a cynical attitude of students who develop community service specifically to strengthen their college applications. Exploitation of a mandated volunteerism system could be encouraged by such a requirement. Source 5, Mandatory Volunteerism from Psychological Science, reports research that proves that requiring activities that should be voluntary discourages future involvement in such activities, making it less likely for community service to be a lifelong habit. Students, especially high schoolers, are extremely overtaxed from their already outrageous tasks at hand.

Mandating them to maintain hours of extra workload could push them over the edge, making them even more stressed and tired. Some students have responsibilities outside of school, such as a job to support their family or a sport to release the hassle of the day. It would be unfair to those students to bar them from graduating, simply because some just dont have the time to spare or the emotional capacity to handle such consuming tasks with all that is on their plate.. Source 7, the graphs from a study by Mark Hugo Lopez, a researcher from the University of Maryland, raises further evidence against the requirement of community service.

Graph 1 shows that support for mandating a requirement about such service is weakest among those currently in school and is about evenly split among those over the age of twenty-one, suggesting a positive trend of open-mindedness, or that the older students get, the easier it is to stick to an agenda. Graph 2 suggests that young people with high levels of scholarship (as opposed to those who decided not to further their education) are more likely to support a community service requirement in high schools. In conclusion this shows that requiring community service in schools like ours would not be a good idea, because although it does make a positive impact in the community, it creates a burden to students forced to fulfill hours and hours of additional workload, taking up their time to study and overall making life more stressful.

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