I think it's kind of screwy to make community service a requirement for high school kids. No, that doesn't mean I think community service is bad, put your damn hand down. However, I think you should volunteer and help people because you WANT to volunteer and help people, not because some school administrator said you had to, or else you don't get to graduate. And really, how freaking ludicrous is that? "What, you didn't complete the arbitrary amount of hours required to get approved by the incredibly fickle lady in charge of the volunteer program? Well piss off, no diploma for you!" That's got to be sending at least twenty five different bad messages. It basically teaches you to hate volunteering, which I think is sort of the opposite of what they were going for.
And yeah, it gets people to do work, which I guess is good for the community but I don't imagine people who have been forced into doing free labor do a very good job. I mean, when you're just going somewhere to collect your damn hours and then blow the whole thing off, there's probably a pretty high percentage of shoddy work going on. No, that doesn't apply to every situation, but it's probably a valid enough concept to be worth complaining about. You end up with a lot of poorly painted fences and drywall replaced with superglue that way.
And I'm not sure if this is a problem anywhere else, but at my school, it's basically impossible to get the hours legitimately, because they only considered about four things to be viable. Animal rescue didn't count. City clean-up didn't count. Fundraising didn't count. But random, stupid crap done for the school did. Really, I think they really taught a lot more kids the joys of BSing, rather than the joys of volunteer work.
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