Should `Volunteering' Be Mandatory Activity?

Annie Han needs to perform only 60 hours of community service to meet graduation requirements at Shorecrest High School in Shoreline.

But as of last week, Han, still a sophomore, had racked up more than 290 hours, much of it working as a volunteer guide at the Pacific Science Center.

"It's like I don't want to leave," she beamed.

Han's story is an example of what is supposed to happen when schools require their students to volunteer: It then becomes a lasting part of their lives.

Mary Ann Anderson, community-service coordinator for the Shoreline School District, said Shorecrest may have been the first public school in the Seattle area to add community service to its graduation criteria two years ago.

But at least two school districts, Bellevue and Federal Way, are grappling with the idea of nudging their students into community service.

In Federal Way the debate over compulsory service was pushed back until later this year after a committee on graduation requirements proposed further study of the issue.

The committee surveyed 4,668 people in March and found that 92 percent of businesses, 66 percent of parents and 30 percent of 11th-graders surveyed favored a service requirement.

A student representative on the committee, Federal Way High School senior Ken Reyhner, said he instead favored a senior project that encouraged some form of community involvement, something many colleges and universities use to distinguish good applicants from great ones.

"Community service is supposed to be something you want to do," Reyhner said.

About two-thirds of high-school students in the Bellevue School District already do community work by choice, said Jan Stout, coordinator of the district's Community Connections office.

Students' volunteer work is recorded on their transcripts, but volunteering remains strictly optional. Stout has been reluctant to propose changes in that policy.

"I find it very difficult to require students to do something that we want to become a commitment from the heart," she said.

But at many private schools, where mandatory service is an old idea, the issue cuts to the core of their concept of education, says Jean Orvis, director of the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences on Capitol Hill.

"We can't just have our students living in ivory towers anymore," Orvis said.

Seattle Academy requires 40 hours of community service from its graduates, and Orvis contends, "It's a wonderful way to broaden the world around them."

A similar line of reasoning led to the decision last year at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle to require community service - 20 hours as of this semester - through a required business course called Human Relationships in the Workplace.

Although some parents and faculty raised concerns about the program early, Joey Collins, the service learning coordinator at Rainier Beach, says the school has a "dual responsibility" to teach academics and good citizenship.

Anderson, the administrator from Shoreline, believes forced community service results in far more positives than negatives.

"We have students who say they wouldn't have done it if it weren't required," she said, "but they valued the experience."