Seniors or Slaves?
By: Kelsey Bates
Think back to when you were in high school and all of the responsibilities and extracurricular activities you did.
Today, high school seniors are being made to do community service in order to graduate. I am a high school senior, and at our high school it is only mandatory to do ten hours of community service, but in other states you are to do anywhere from 40 to 75. I, myself, barely have time to eat, let alone do 40 or 75 hours of community service. Kids have multiple things they need to get done their senior year and go through a lot with sports, school work, having a job, college applications and many other extra curricular activities.
At schools that have the National Honors Society, it is mandatory for them to do community service in order to be in it. I think that the state, superintendents and the principals should only make it mandatory to do community service. I don’t think that they should make it mandatory for everyone that is a senior. President Barack Obama is developing a plan where it is mandatory that middle school and high school students complete 50 hours of community service and college students complete 100 hours for every year they attend (Watson ). I do not think that making middle school kids do 50 hours of community service is a good idea. Let kids be kids, we need to stop making kids grow up so fast. We are trying to make 12 and 13 year olds act like an adult, when they are still figuring out how to be a kid. Yes they are teenagers but that doesn’t mean we should put all that responsibility on them as young as they are.
I’m not trying to say, “It’s bad to help the community”, because that is the farthest thing from the truth. I think if seniors are going to do community service they should volunteer to do it, not stress about graduating because they haven’t got it done. Yet, I do agree that it would look nice on your college application, but not all high school seniors plan on going to college. There are many kids out there that do community service just because they like to volunteer. If that is the case, then have them write down what they did in their college application, no go through the hassle of turning it into the school so they can count it for them to graduate. I just don’t see the point in making community service mandatory seeing how half the kids will lie about doing it anyways, or somehow get around it. Let alone putting a number of hours they have to do on top of that. So the answer is up to you, do you think high school seniors should have to do mandatory community service in order to graduate?
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