High School Community Service Requirement

[Still BLUTANG]

Originally Posted by Munchkin03

In order to get the IB diploma, we had to do a total of 200 community service hours, 100 of which had to be in a dedicated project.

i LOVE that requirement being towards a DEDICATED project.

My county has a service requirement now. back in the old millenium when i graduated, i don't think they had it. however, i did a major amount of service through church, kitty hawk (AFJROTC honor society), and sga.

question:

i sit on a couple of scholarship review panels and all the awards require community service. since all the school local districts MANDATE kids complete X number of hours, i don't give points for doing the minimum. I give points for longevity and whether or not someone from the place they claimed they've done 40 million hours of service writes them a rec.

i feel like the kid who has volunteered consistently over a year or so at one place is more dedicated than the kid who volunteers somewhere different every saturday AND lists ALLLLLLLLL of those places on an application. I've gotten into heated debate with the rest of the panel about this.

do you guys have thoughts about this?

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by Still BLUTANG

do you guys have thoughts about this?

I absolutely agree. In my case, 200 hours over 4 years is nothing--that ends up being roughly 2 hours a week when school's in session (I ended up having more than 150 hours just for my mentoring project). By taking on a dedicated project, you get to know the people at the organization, which means that they know you and your work really well.

You can't reward people for doing just the minimum.

[AlphaFrog]

I had to do 100 hrs, and you couldn't spend less than 20 hrs/project.

I was the director of the liturgy choir for my service hours.