By Olivia Palker ‘24, Commentary Editor

NA’s students working at the Interfaith Food Pantry. Image courtesy of @na_service

Last year, Director of Community Service Ms. Fischer’s announcement — “don’t forget to log your hours!” — had a tone of desperation: too many people had missed the deadline. In a couple of months, Ms. Fischer will make the trek to the podium in Coraci to voice the same announcement, reminding us of our graduation requirement: completion of 10 annual community service hours.

As I somewhat mindlessly wrote a 300-word reflection following the Community Service Councils’ (CSC) prompts, I couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty for the words I was typing — would I have really done this if there was no requirement? Is community service still valuable in helping us develop character (one of our service outcome prompts) if it’s enforced? 

The way I see it, there are two issues with NA’s community service requirement: 1) a requirement makes the community service hours we log superficial, and 2) NA’s minimum is incredibly low — low enough to be completed in one-two days. 

To tackle the first issue: are students still thoughtfully contributing to their community if they are being forced to help? This question feels like one my IB HL Philosophy class would tackle. To put it plainly — if a student’s community service hours are still helping others, regardless of the intentions behind it, they are still serving the community. However, physically serving the community is different from developing a genuine desire and yearning to do good. While packing bags at the Interfaith Food Pantry is extremely helpful and directly fights food insecurity, being forced to do so doesn’t make our NA community a better place. The NA community has expressed that these hours are a chore — rather than a natural inclination to do good — and have often voiced frustrated groans when they open the MobileServe website to see a massive 0.00 hours logged.

Do I still think that kids at NA would do community service if it wasn’t required? Probably not; I’m sure many still would, but there would be a large majority of kids who wouldn’t feel the need to fill their hours with optional community service. 

In my opinion, instead of instilling a requirement of community service, the CSC should inspire a need to do good in the NA community and offer optional hours. By presenting the importance of community service to both our community and outside communities, the CSC can focus on teaching students why it is so crucial to get involved. This way, in college and beyond, NA students will be prepared to go out into the world and be involved in community service out of the goodness of their hearts. NA students should treat community service not as a means to an end, but an end within itself (shoutout Dr. D!). You can find a genuine passion and actually help people while doing something you love instead of being forced to pack bags and groan your way through it. The CSC can help encourage students to find a community or cause that compels them to serve instead of just enforcing a requirement. 

Now, if NA is going to require community service, 10 hours is a measly amount compared to other schools that typically require anywhere from 15 to 50 hours of community service a year. While kids groan at the 10 hours, does just 10 hours of community service have anything larger than a slight impact? If we round the number of students at NA to 475, the 10 hours per student is only 4,750 hours of community service per year. As a school that claims its “Newark” roots in its name, shouldn’t we be focusing on doing the most good and service possible for the Newark community? Raising the yearly requirement to 15 service hours would increase the total by more than 2,000 hours, to 7,125. Five hours isn’t a large increment to increase this requirement by — and look at the good it would do. 

Ultimately, by looking at the size of the requirement and at the sheer action of “requiring” community service, NA’s requirement starts to look like a box to check off for students. With the amount of time that teachers put into selecting a CSC, they should be able to brainstorm ways to both help outside and inside our community to inspire people who genuinely want to make a change, and more than just a slight one.