Students Must Volunteer to Make Grade

Beginning next year, high school students in this affluent Detroit suburb will be required to put in 40 hours of community service to receive a diploma.

“They need to learn that Bloomfield Hills is not what it’s really like in the outside world,” said Deputy Supt. Gary Doyle.

Beginning with incoming freshmen in the fall, the students will be required to volunteer 40 hours of service to hospitals, churches, senior citizens’ groups, charities or other programs by the time they graduate.

“I think getting kids out of the comfortable Bloomfield Hills syndrome, where everything is as it ought to be, to see other people who for one reason or another have less means than they do, can only be helpful in the development of each and every person,” said Gary Grossnickle, principal of Bloomfield Hills Middle School.

A recent Roosevelt University study ranked Bloomfield Hills as the nation’s sixth-wealthiest suburb, with estimated 1985 per capita income of $44,456.

The new program drew outside praise from education experts and criticism from some students.

“Service can challenge two widely held assumptions that teen-agers have little to contribute and that no one wants what they have,” said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the New Jersey-based Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

“A service program says that responsibility to human need is related not to just credentialism but, above all, to caring and compassion,” said Boyer, whose foundation recommended in 1983 that public schools institute community service requirements.

‘That’s Not Fair’

“That’s not fair; that’s really not fair,” Jennifer O’Brien, 14, a student at Lahser High School, said. “ . . . There’s no reason why they should be punished, and that’s what it is--a punishment.”

Incoming freshmen “have other things to do,” added Susan Sickinger, 15. “No one else had to do it.”

“We’re aware that there will be some student resistance,” Doyle said, adding: “I’ve sat down with some students who were negative . . . and I think we’ll change a lot of minds.”