It is no secret that a big part of East’s culture is racking up credentials for college applications. With over 100 clubs, many of which are service-related, it may be surprising to hear that volunteering is even less enforced than it was in years past. A change to policy in February of 2022 may have changed many students’ priorities as far as extracurriculars go.
In past years, all students were required to complete 25 hours of logged service to graduate. However, at the end of the 2021-2022 school year, this changed. As of February of 2022, Service Learning, as the program was called, is “no longer required in any capacity,” according to the CHCCS website. Despite this change, it seems as if the heavy accumulation of extracurriculars, to impress colleges, is as common as ever at East. In order to gain insight into how this change affected student involvement in service, I talked to two students who both lead service-based clubs. When talking with senior Ivy Shah, the leader of East Cares, she reinforced my suspicions.
“Kids would just do anything to get their hours up. At one point, it became almost a battle to see who could get more service hours. People would have some crazy ones, like 200 hours or even more.” Shah said.
Senior Anna Jooste, a leader of the “Be the Good” club, had even more to say about the culture of service at our school.
“I feel that when it comes to volunteering, it’s become another competition for students at East, almost as if it’s a race to get the most service hours and be involved in the most clubs,” says Jooste. “Especially with COVID, and clubs unable to meet in person, volunteering has become less focused on engaging in more meaningful service, and more on merely collecting service hours for college applications.”
Overall, it seems that many students have conflicting opinions on the removal of the Service Learning requirement, myself included. . On one hand, the change has taken a lot of pressure off of a generally overwhelmed student body, but on the other, it seems as if the only way to be involved in volunteering is to throw yourself into as many clubs as you can muster. This excessive participation in extracurricular activities lessens the actual importance of these activities, leading to major burnout.
Personally, I think this issue of student enervation is related to a much deeper, much more complex cause: the extreme academic competition that is ever present at East. This issue is quite loaded and complex, and can’t be discussed fully in the remainder of this article, but it is important to note how this affects service participation at East. Because volunteering has seemed like a burden to many students, both due to the hours requirement and pressure from colleges, it has lost a lot of its depth and importance in students’ eyes. What was once seen as going above and beyond is now average, and that bar seems to keep rising higher and higher.
Despite this, I hope there is still a way to reverse the effects Volunteering has had such a substantial impact on our community, in both those helping out and those receiving aid.
“It’s a way for us to engage with, connect, and help others, as well as to give back. Service provides opportunities to learn something new about communities and ourselves, gain new perspectives, and acquire new skills,” Jooste said.
The focus of volunteering at East is often service hours and college credit, however the reward you can gain from engaging in service is so much more than that. I have seen that impact firsthand in my own volunteering. Over the summer, I did a service trip to Costa Rica, and the experiences I had really did shape me as a person. Though there were hard parts in the trip, the rewarding feeling I got knowing that I changed a few people’s lives, even microscopically, was incredible. Obviously this is an extreme example, and you can definitely gain the same insight and benefit from smaller, more localized service projects, but it is a great reference point for just how fulfilling altruism can be.
Though it is hard to truly say the impact of cutting the service requirement had on East, I think we can deduct a few things from this change and its effects. Firstly, requirements aren’t always necessarily good. Even when they come from a good place, forcing anyone to do anything is a recipe for unhappiness and a job half done. Though service may be less abundant at our school since this change, that has allowed it to become more rich and meaningful for the programs and students that do continue. Secondly, there are some factors to volunteering engagement at our school that are completely unrelated to this change. I believe it is more important that we push students to volunteer in a significant way than to simply force them to collect meaningless hours. Otherwise, charity becomes another chore for kids to complete before they graduate instead of being the powerful experience that it is meant to be. I think that the best solution to encouraging students to engage in service is just that: encouragement. After all, one of the most important things we can do in our lives is give back.
Photo by Avery Tortora
