<p>In light of the fact that I learned on another thread that not all things actually are community service, I was wondering this: is a student's volunteer work at a museum doing administrative, janitorial, and touring tasks considered service to the community?</p>
<p>Regardless of what the high school says, when I see volunteer work, I treat it as volunteer work. Realizing that volunteers usually do whatever an organization needs them to do, I don't have an opinion about the task they perform.</p>
<p>The museum is a community place, they are volunteering not getting paid and they are interacting with the community - yes, I would say so. </p>
<p>What was the beef with community service????</p>
<p>Thanks Dean J. Her aspiration is to study classics, so she volunteers in a museum, but after reading the other thread it was no longer clear to me that such would benefit the community.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
What was the beef with community service????
[/QUOTE]
I haven't read a thread about this, but I have heard that many high schools with service requirements are putting limitations on the sort of service students can do. A common prohibition: teaching something along the lines of "Sunday School". Volunteer work through a house of worship isn't off limits for these schools, but I think the group helped is supposed to be in the larger community. So, if you joined your church's Habitat team or worked in a soup kitchen with a religious affiliation, it would be acceptable.</p>
<p>I honestly don't think any of the colleges are concerned with this.</p>
<p>^^high schools also put parameters in place to attempt to keep kids from "cheating" on their community service hours. Requiring community service hours is a great concept but one of the unfortunate problems associated w/ requiring students to serve is that they often do the right thing for what may be the wrong reasons. </p>
<p>zm...a hs may not look at your D's service as "serving" enough people (although they absolutely should) but a college will def. see it for what it is. Good solid community service that extends beyond any hs requirement for x number of hours and demonstrates a commitment. Ironic isn't it that genuine service like your Ds may be called into question whereas people who only did an activity for the hours wouldn't be.</p>
<p>"zm...a hs may not look at your D's service as "serving" enough people "</p>
<p>That was my question and also because the museum charges admission, so I wasn't sure where that would count, but it's been a great experience for her on so many levels.</p>
<p>And to go back to that other thread, while I don't think that the high school should count teaching Sunday school as community service, I would expect that it would still be a plus on an application.</p>
<p>Before my son decided he didn't have enough community service to bother trying out for the National Honor Society we did wonder if some of his unpaid work like writing computer programs for a professor, or putting together a website for my husband's med. school department could count. Both activities ended up on his application somewhere or other.</p>
<p>We have a zoo near us and a lot of hs students do community service at the zoo. Some parlay this into paying jobs, at which point they stop counting it toward community service. I would think this is comparable to a museum, so yes, it should count as community service.</p>
<p>I agree that the distinction is what the high school may count as meeting their community service requirements, and how the colleges interpret volunteer/community work. </p>
<p>Your D's work in a museum definitely counts as the latter, and it makes no difference that the museum charges admission (I am a museum administrator; museums NEED volunteers of all kinds, and there is a monetized value to volunteer time that shows up on grants and financial statements.)</p>
<p>We are realizing that many kids in D's senior class are hugely exagerrating their service hours. There seems to be a nuclear arms race of sorts going on over who volunteers the most hours. She is reporting hers accurately and hoping the admissions folks are not overly impressed by massive hour totals. I only mention this because community service seems to be a very gray area with many different takes on what the defnitions actually are. It's to your credit that you're even worried about being accurate. I don't think that's typical.</p>
<p>LOL, mammall, do ya think? There was one organization in our town that gave hours in terms of the value of donation divided by $5, as long as student said that he/she earned the money by working somewhere else and used the money for the donation. So... $500 donation=100 hours of community service. Voila.</p>
<p>My son was brutally honest on this. He hadn't done much community service or paid employment. He'd done <em>some</em> but not much. I view this like the huge laundry list of ECs. You start to wonder.</p>
<p>CS was a huge thing at my kids' school when they were attending. All recognition, appointment to NHS, selection for leadership/character based awards and scholarships, nominations for stuff like Boys State and HOBY, nominations for university scholarships... those all incorporated the number of hours. It got to be a horse race, honestly. We had kids with four and five hundred hours; some legit, some not so legit. I don't know what it's like now, but when oldest was applying to college, service-based awards were sort of the rage. Since then, I hope that the furor over quantity has died down some. </p>
<p>Jeez, I'm glad all that's over. Son was complaining the other day about a Habitat event his fraternity did. He got up at around 6/7 AM on the weekend to report to some job site and was ****ED that he was one of a handful of brothers there. He got on the cell phone and called people, who were either conveniently out of town or just downright refused to get out of bed. I said, "welcome, welcome to the real world!" When things don't "count", people don't "do".</p>
<p>This also sequed into a discussion on the economic concept of utility value, but his ire was so great, I'm not sure he got the point.</p>
<p>My school makes a huge differentiation between community service and simpily nonpaid work. They say that if it is work that you should be getting paid for (ie volunteering at a museum) and it is not directly serving the marginalised, then it is not service. I don't think I agree which is why it's always sort of bothered me..</p>
<p>A little side story on this theme: The hs my girls attend does not require community service. Still, many of our kids are very involved in one way or another through Interact, Invisible Children, Christmas for Kids, 4-H etc. Another county hs does have a CS requirement. Two years ago at the 11th hour, a group of seniors from that HS participated in our local Relay for Life event in an attempt to get 20 hours of CS before graduation (which was just 1 week away). It was a disaster, they partied, were totally disrespectful of the event and one girl vomited and peed in the middle of the field while she was being was arrested for being drunk. </p>
<p>I am sure that requiring CS leads some students to recognize the intrinsic value of service. I am just as sure that requiring CS leads to cheating, illegitimate claims and flouting a requirement that is supposed to encourage goodness in our kids. I don't know the answer beyond the awareness that maybe it should be parents who introduce, encourage and reinforce the whole service idea and not schools.</p>
<p>I have a similar story although not as shocking as peeing and vomiting :eek:. My son was a service coordinator for NHS; he arranged quarterly weekend activities with Habitat and the kids were required to do so many hours in order to "stay in" NHS. Toward the end of the semester, they had their last Habitat build. A whole bunch of kids showed up early one Saturday, because they needed the hours, and basically stood around all morning doing nothing. There were a dozen-plus kids there, and about 4 were working. Finally, a group of about six asked if they could leave and would my son sign off on the hours. He told them to go to the Habitat supervisor and have him do it (he knew they were putting down that they'd been there all day). You could tell from the behavior of the other people working on the build that they thought this group was just getting in the way. It was a total embarassment to our school, and NHS. What a grand impression they made. That's what happens when you "force" someone to do community service.</p>
<p>..............</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't know the answer beyond the awareness that maybe it should be parents who introduce, encourage and reinforce the whole service idea and not schools.
[/quote]
Bingo. I could add a fairly long list of things that should be left under the umbrella of parental responsibility. I also don't like that community service is often only counted if the segment of the community being served meets someone's random idea of the marginalized. Mowing an elderly neighbor's lawn is just as noble as taking part in a more trendy service project.</p>
<p>I do like the way CS is handled at D's school, though. It's a Catholic H.S., so we parents were not coerced into CS participation for our girls -- we choose the school knowing it fit into our value system. Projects have to be pre-approved & they are very careful about documentatin from a supervised agency. (I can guarantee that a girl peeing in a field while completing her CS would be booted out of the school.) Several times throughout the girls' time at school they attend reflection session and discuss the role of service in their faith tradition. A three page reflection paper must also be completed, covering how the project affected them, how they impacted other people, and describing the insights about themselves & others that they discovered. The focus of CS is to remind the girls that as Catholics, we are called in the Gospel to love and to serve. It's really a wonderful tie in to the religious instruction provided. In a public school, where any faith based reflection would be off limits, it is much more difficult to structure a program like this. I can imagine Objectivists picketing the school.....</p>